Centering Women’s Voices: Findings and Implications from the US Midwest

The garden in the Midwest residential community corrections facility is an example of an integrative participatory research project that utilizes clinical (client-centered) and applied (assessment-oriented) sociology as an inclusive research strategy. This chapter focuses on the analysis of qualitative data collected pre-pandemic over the course of 2019 and the brief ethnographic insight we gained in the summer of 2020. Our findings show that, besides acquiring technical skills, women report mental and physical benefits. We identified interactional effects that aid team culture, client–staff interaction, and develop prosocial skills. We find that gardening provides low-cost programming that contributes to better health outcomes, and prosocial empowerment, and holds the potential to address food insecurity for criminal justice-involved women and their communities.