n February 2017, when Keia Blount was preparing to be released after serving a five-year prison term at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women, she had no idea where to go.
“Family was not an option to go back to,” she says. “There was nowhere for me to go except for a shelter.”
At the last minute, she found Benevolence Farm in Graham, North Carolina, a transitional residential and employment program on an organic farm. She applied, a few members of the staff came to visit her in prison, and within in a week, she was admitted—just in time for her release.
“Women will be released from state prisons, but they are not guaranteed safe and secure housing,” says Kristen Powers, the executive director of Benevolence Farm.
Due to the war on drugs, which began in the early 1970s, the number of women in U.S. federal and state prisons grew by nearly 800% between 1978 and 2014. But a corresponding increase in services for those women never arrived, says Powers.
“Just being out in nature and being outside, pulling weeds, it’s super therapeutic,” says Megan Holmes, a transition coordinator at a juvenile detention facility in Texas and lead author of a 2019 study showing that horticultural and similar outdoor community service programs were more successful at reducing recidivism than other kinds of programs. Benevolence Farm’s recidivism rate is around 5%, lower than the national average of roughly 40%.
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