Five years ago, a handful of volunteers split open the earth in front of the Baskin art studios. They laid out a nest of manure and placed emerging seedlings into soft soil. Full classes of students have come and gone since; plants have grown, wilted and been replanted.
Tim Young, the designer, conceptual artist, and head gardener, drew up plans for the project with meticulous detail. He chose onions and spinach, broccoli and cabbages, cucumbers and leeks and garlic. His stewardship has been tender and careful; he wanted to create a space to be proud of. Certainly, he has done that.
But, he has never set foot in the garden.
Timothy James Young has spent a majority of the past 25 years in solitary confinement on death row at San Quentin. Since his incarceration, prosecutors and judges have cast doubt on the fairness of the trial. Although another individual has confessed to the crime, Young remains in a cell to this day.
It was from this 6-by-9 cell he drew up plans for the garden, and from that same 6-by-9 cell he has continued to serve as its steward for the last five years. 
In the middle of a square of Young’s carefully selected and tended to plants, lie metal and concrete recreations of the fixtures in his living space. From the bed and toilet, to the cell door, the layout is a meticulous reproduction of the constricted conditions in which many prisoners spend their lives
“Oftentimes [people] will sit on the bench, take in the scenery and write to me. They’ll tell me what they feel in that moment, what they’re going through, or they’ll describe the landscape; what the garden looks like or what animals are interacting with the space,” Young said in a phone call with City on a Hill Press. “Every time I open a letter from anyone who’s been there it’s reinvigorating, it refuels me and lets me know the work I do is not for naught, that it does count, it does make a difference, it is touching and affecting people. It encourages me to keep fighting the good fight.”
It was in Nov. 2019 that The Institute of the Arts and Sciences worked in collaboration with multidisciplinary artist and abolitionist jackie sumell to bring Young’s vision to life. Young’s Solitary Garden is one of 17 across the nation, all orchestrated by sumell to highlight the abolition movement and envision a landscape void of prisons.
Students, faculty, and community members gathered in Tim’s garden on Nov. 2 in commemoration of its fifth anniversary. Bags of tulip bulbs sat on wooden tables with coffee and fruits for everyone to take and enjoy. Attendees spent the event with their knees in the dirt, trading spades and shovels, pressing starter plants into turned soil, just like the volunteers five years prior.
“Measurements of Growth,” a book accredited to “Tim Young and Friends,” was on display and available to everyone who wished to pick up a copy. The volume includes Young’s retelling of designing the Solitary Garden, as well as poems Tim has written and pieces from others on freedom and abolition.
“The imagination is the most radical tool that we will ever have, so I think artists are really charged with a responsibility to visualize abolition, to make it irresistible, to call in Toni Cade Bambara,” sumell said on a phone call with City on a Hill Press. “My hope is that this work seduces and destroys. First, it seduces you with the beauty of possibility and then it destroys ignorance, destroys complacency, destroys your own reliance on systems of punishment and control — or what we call the Prison Industrial Complex.”
sumell’s initial conception for the Solitary Garden Project began in 2001 when she became acquainted with Herman Wallace, a political prisoner and member of the Black Panther Party who spent 41 years in solitary confinement. Over the course of twelve years, the two exchanged thousands of letters, eventually dreaming up “Herman’s house,” an idyllic home designed by Herman to be built outside the confines of prison walls.
This dream materialized into “The House That Herman Built,” an exhibit that displays a model of the home in conjunction with a replica of the cell Wallace spent decades in.
“When I first asked Herman, who lived for 29 years in a 6-by-9 cell, ‘What kind of house do you dream of?’ He said, ‘I can clearly see the gardens, full of gloxinias, delphiniums and roses. And I wish for guests to be able to smile and walk through gardens all year round,’” sumell said.
After living 41 years of his life in solitary confinement, Wallace came home on Oct.1, 2013 and died just three days later from advanced stage liver cancer.
Nearly two years after his death, sumell finalized her concept of the current iteration of The Solitary Gardens, many of which utilize crops like sugar cane, cotton, and tobacco to reflect the progression of chattel slavery to incarceration.
The 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except if utilized as punishment for a crime.
This section laid the framework for the current Prison Industrial Complex (PIC), which functions on a similar scale to the plantation economic model of decades past. The PIC extracts labor from individuals who receive no pay or mere cents for their work, yet are simultaniously forced to pay for necessities like adequate food, sanitary items, and messages to family.
“The three meals a day that the state provides [are] scant, inedible, unidentifiable, and often unfit for human consumption. I depend on canteen items and quarterly packages for sustenance and survival,” Young wrote. “That, of course, requires one to have readily available funds. Why? The Prison Industrial complex is set up to either starve you or force you to spend money to put food in your stomach. It is capitalism at its best.“
Prison abolition activists draw a direct line from slavery to our current prison model; acknowledging the fundamental flaws that exist at the core of our justice system disproportionately affect people of color and fail in their purported mission of justice. While prison reform seeks to change the system from within, abolition activists instead push for the complete restructuring of the prison system from the ground up.
UCSC is the only university in the country that offers a Visualizing Abolition certificate, a curriculum developed by Professor of Feminist Studies, History of Consciousness, and Legal Studies Dr. Gina Dent and IAS Director Dr. Rachel Nelson.
“All of the [prison] abolition work has been inspired by the anti-slavery abolitionist cause,” said Dent in an interview with UCSC staff writer Dan Write. “It has always been our view that we could imagine a future without prisons if only we could draw on the way our ancestors imagined a world without slavery.”
Artists like sumell and Young find themselves uniquely situated to tackle the mission of imagining what abolition would look like. In their work, they express a strong vision for students to reflect on.
“There’s something about the garden that gives you a gentle nudge into wanting to learn about abolition and wanting to learn about Tim’s story,” said IAS intern Esabella Gerardo. “His story is one that embodies what the mission of the IAS is: To bring justice to people who are experiencing what Tim is experiencing.”
One of Young’s early designs.
The time that students spend in the garden — whether tending to plants or simply passing through — serves as an acknowledgement of Tim’s personhood, a dignity that is too often not accorded to those in the prison system.
“People at the solitary garden see the worth in me,” Young said. “They see that I have meaning, that I have value, and that speaks volumes [in a] system which tries to make you insignificant on a daily basis. I feel seen.”
Young’s circumstances are not unique. He is one of 2,802 prisoners currently condemned to death in the United States, 61 percent of whom are housed in solitary confinement. Estimates indicate about four percent of people on death row are innocent, meaning roughly 112 innocent people currently await execution.
But Young himself is unique. He is an artist, a music-lover, a writer, a poet, a philanthropist, and an activist. He engages in politics and is currently conceptualizing a public safety reform bill. He donates what he has — time and any money he can spare — to those in need. His beneficiaries range from the Urban Peace Movement and the Anti Police-Terror Project to local art studios and theater companies. When he sees a small business on the news that has been victimized, he reaches out to help.
“When all is said and done, I want the world to know that I was more than just a prison number and more than what the carceral system projected me to be,” Young said. “Even from behind bars and with the weight of the legal justice system on my back, I can still have a voice, a vision, a platform, and still be able to make a positive impact in society, and in black and brown communities.
That’s who I am. That’s what I’m about. And that’s what I want my legacy to be.”
If you are interested in writing to Tim Young: Timothy James Young #F2334, Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, 480 Alta Road, San Diego, CA 92179 or go to www.timothyjamesyoung.com for more information.
