( Cyndi, I agree with SarahW’s warning to you. Her advice about the risks and possible consequences in your case is sufficiently direct and explicit that I don’t feel the need to add anything more on the subject. )

There are some very lush and productive backyard home gardens in some Sacramento neighborhoods, by the way. You can see the corn and beanstalks growing over the fence tops. I’ve noticed that a lot of the households are Hmong folks. Stockton and Sacramento are where a large fraction of the Hmong immigrants to this country were resettled. Geographically a far cry from the hill forests of Laos, but they’re making a go of it.

Sometimes I see chickens scratching around in the front yards, too, which makes me smile. One of the reasons I like this place, you can occasionally hear roosters crowing in the backyards of some of the houses. Not just the Hmong-settled neighborhoods in the south area- all over town. The zoning laws of Sacramento apparently make allowance for that sort of thing. Some people might find that annoying, but I’ll take some 6:00am cockcrows over 9:00am leafblowing machines for hours on end, any day of the week.

I also have a cab driving buddy who has been known to put a fire pit in his front yard and make a campfire once in a while, and as far as I know, nobody has ever hassled him about it. Not sure how strictly legal that is, but this place is laid back.

You couldn’t do that in McLean, Virginia. Much of McLean doesn’t even have sidewalks, for that matter. Walking to any neighboring town, for part of the way you’re more or less taking your life in your hands, having to walk directly on the road pavement on narrow roads that often host a huge amount of automobiles
(as in “traffic-choked.”) No bike lanes on the roads yet, either- although I just did an on-line search, and found out that they’re about ready to put in one .7 mile link to the other local bike paths, which is undoubtedly better than nothing. Still, I don’t envy the people who live there.

On the positive side, my folks did have a vegetable garden in their back yard when they lived in nearby Vienna. So at least that’s okay with the local community standards (as long as you don’t grow…etc., etc.)

I knew a woman who lived in downtown Sacramento as a child, during the WW2 Victory Garden era. She said that every back yard had a garden, the alleys were all strung with lights, and at night the adults would sit on the back porch and watch over the children playing there.

It seems like such a waste of rich alluvial soil to put a lawn in, instead. In my opinion.

I was kind of impatient with the well-meant
handwringing about our obligations to our fellow man that followed.

The correct response to the attempts at contact you have received from the inmate is clear to me.

Someone needs to wise you up. Your instincts to avoid this man are your God-given common sense, and you should understand that the follow-up letter was an attempt to use your higher angels against you, for the inmate’s own benefit.

In short, it’s a con.
Inmates target some women featured in articles in the local paper because they are casting a net for marks, women who will be a present and possibly future source of income and goodies and other forms of help.

Targeting small business owners, especially single women of a certain age or, even better, pictured as being overweight or plain, (not saying you are, but that’s catnip to the would-be con) is a common strategy employed…to strike up a correspondence, establish a sort of intimacy, to appeal to a woman’s emotional needs, or generousity, whatever he figures out they might be; he strikes gold when he builds up an imaginary relationship that allows him to eventually reel in the prizes – financial support, mainly, (although the game itself is fun, the process of reeling in a victim gratifying.) and status among his prison peers.

He is not interested in your craft business, nor you, but you as a depersonalized source of gain.

I can not emphasize more strongly what an old ploy and a common one his is. Most telling is the fact that he criticized you, essentially mildly insulting you as “unforgiving”, hoping you will respond and behave in a way to disapprove his mild allegation.

(I believe Gavin Debecker , author of “Gift of Fear”, calls that “typecasting”. )

The whining, manipulative follow-up letter is a clue.

You are not the answer to this person’s prayers, not his saviour, you are a target.

It can be a struggle, though.

Onward.

Here are links to some gardens programs at correctional facilities in California:

http://www.insightgardenprogram.org/program.html

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-19145093.html

A related archive with various stories worthy of attention

http://articles.latimes.com/keyword/prisoner-rehabilitation

Of cource, you have no personal obligation to take on a prisoner as your employee or personal project. However, i can say that it is common for prisoners to try anything to reach out to the unincarcerated in their effort to make some kind of leads that will help them function upon release.

imagine a person released without money, without a home, without a job and without even identification. imagine doing that yourself.

There are a couple of practical things you could do:

1. see if you can lookup this person’s criminal history in your state department of corrections website, to give yourself a sense if he presents a threat.

2. advise the corrections department that you do not want this prisoner to send mail to your address, if that’s what you decide.

2. lookup “prisoner reentry” in your state or city, make a couple of calls, and accurately record the services and contacts, forward this to the prisoner, explain that you cannot offer him assistance, to desist from writing you, and wish him well.

Love this site, love the input, and was just hoping to ad to the discourse without really having any credentials to do so other than reverance.

When the smoke clears and I as an individual can look myself in the eye and be comfortable with the compromises I’ve made and the pitfalls I have succumed to, then and only then will the contradictions and imaginary dialectic that exists in western culture be reconciled and integratedinto the whole of my experience as messy as that might be.

Tragic, comic, moving, and insatiable….I remain a neophyte under a new moon and sun.