The Prisoner's Apothecary

With The Elevate Prize I will create the first holistic, abolitionist, cafe and diversion program of its kind. The Prisoner’s Apothecary is dedicated to the life and legacy of death row exoneree John Thompson (JT), who was wrongfully convicted due to egregious prosecutorial misconduct. Upon his exoneration he committed to overhaul the system that stole so many years of his life. JT passed away in 2017 leaving his nonprofit, Resurrection After Exoneration (RAE) to his widow, Laverne Thompson. With her enthusiastic support, she transferred ownership of the RAE building to make The Prisoner’s Apothecary possible. 

The heart of this project includes a plant-based cafe, apothecary and diversion program that provides herbal medicine grown in collaboration with currently incarcerated persons. RAE also will house an education space furthering plant education to returning citizens and community partners.

This project is part of a larger abolitionist initiative that interrupts the revolving door to incarceration by employing returning citizens, offering trauma-informed peer mentorships and destigmatizing incarceration. 

As we collectively seek to end cycles of harm, The Prisoner’s Apothecary uniquely brings together returning citizens, impacted youth, artists, activists, herbalists, and any community members who want to be a part of transforming the criminal punishment system.

I have spent the last twenty years moving in and out of prisons, jails, and detention centers as an artist, abolitionist, and an advocate. I do this because my elders, Herman Wallace, Robert King, and Albert Woodfox, The Angola 3, invested lifetimes of tutelage, love, and patience in my possibility. I do this because it is where I discover my own humanity. 

My creative interests derive, in no small part, from my multi-decade artistic work with people in solitary confinement. This work centers joy, beauty and liberation as an antidote to the daily brutality of oppression. My most celebrated project, Herman’s House, resulted from a twelve-year collaboration with Herman Wallace, who spent forty-one years in solitary confinement in Louisiana’s penitentiary system. Since Herman’s release and ascendence in 2013, this work has evolved into several projects that utilize the tools of art, abolition, permaculture, and social practice to facilitate unexpected exchanges between incarcerated people in solitary confinement and volunteers on the “outside”,  including The Prisoner’s Apothecary. 

Organized around abolitionist pedagogy, mindfulness practices, and compassion, my life’s work begs society to reconcile a violent past with the implications on the present, in order to collectively construct a very different future.

If prisons worked to deter crime, the United States would be the  safest country in the world. It is not. The Prisoner’s Apothecary seeks to create replicable alternatives to punishment starting in the city that incarcerates more people per capita than any place in the world.

Chattel slavery did not end. It merely evolved into systems of punishment, judgement and control; from the school-to-prison pipeline to the prison industrial complex. On a given day in the United States, 2.3 million people are imprisoned, including an estimated 80,000 held in solitary confinement. People in prison and jail are disproportionately poor, and Native American, Latinx, and Black Americans are overrepresented in our carceral institutions. The criminalized population also includes 840,000 on parole and 3.6 million on probation. 

The Prisoner’s Apothecary centers the voices of currently and formerly incarcerated individuals through praxis and practice.  As incarcerated individuals participate in the process of growing, designing, and sharing herbal medicine, they have a unique opportunity to heal the communities they are often accused of harming. In this way, prisoners contribute to the healing of populations outside of prison walls, transcending American perceptions of criminality, restitution, and redemption. 

Today we are combating a strong narrative of fear born of racialized capitalism. Through the act of shared gardening and medicine making, The Prisoner’s Apothecary aims to demonstrate how ignoring the vitality of “other” impoverishes our own imaginations and collective well-being. Convincing society-at-large of a seminal concept, like prison abolition, requires accumulative success, education, innovation and a willingness to be vulnerable. It requires society to abandon its relationship to punishment, surveillance and policing as the dominant responses to harm. The Prisoner’s Apothecary will implement sustainable alternatives to incarceration and space to cross-pollinate ideas and experiences. We will co-create a healing justice space that centers the lived experiences of formerly incarcerated people, destigmatizes incarceration and radically shifts our cultural response to crime.

If we approach abolition as a practice rather than a destination we can accept that unlearning systems of oppression, like growing a plant, requires daily attention and care. The Prisoner’s Apothecary will help us dream beyond what we know by radically challenging the dominant culture’s reductive understanding of criminality.  We need all hands on deck to heal a society intensely divided by reductive identities and fear. Collective healing is the only solution. We must keep g(r)oing.

Anything we wish to be better at requires good teachers and motivation. Practicing abolition calls for daily actions that strengthen our commitment to ending cycles of harm.  The Prisoners Apothecary teaches us abolitionist strategy through dedication to daily practice and is exemplified by way of proximity to the lived experience of plants, their natural relationships and the stories they tell. This project is an outgrowth of over twenty years of creative abolitionist projects including the Solitary Gardens where 6’ x 9’ garden beds maintain the blueprint of a standard U.S. solitary confinement cell. The beds are designed and remotely gardened by incarcerated collaborators, known as Solitary Gardeners. Through growing almanacs, written and photographic exchanges, and occasional prison visits, we translate prisoners’ imaginations into the ground as we grow plants of their choosing. The Solitary Gardens directly and metaphorically asks us to imagine a landscape without prisons. As the gardens mature, the prison architecture is overpowered by plant life, proving that nature—like hope, love, and imagination—will ultimately triumph over the harm humans impose on each other and on the planet.  The Prisoner’s Apothecary was proudly part of two Solitary Gardener’s successful parole applications, illustrating a metric of art and activism.