LOS ANGELES — The air was suffocating to Genea Richardson. At 23, she was placed in a concrete cell, along with seven other women, four bunk beds, four lockers, a toilet and a shower — all crammed in 400 square feet. For 18 years, there was no personal space, no privacy, no intimacy.
During her time at the Central California Women's Facility (CCWF) in Chowchilla, California, she found unexpected seeds of hope. In December 2019, she volunteered to water the plants in a small garden patch outside. There, amid the grass, weeds, soil and trees, she felt grounded. Having grown up in the urban sprawl of South Central Los Angeles, she found an unexpected connection to God in those shoots of nature.
The garden gave her a window into a new life. “In those moments,” Richardson says, “I had peace.”
She was first incarcerated in the year 2000. When a young woman named Sandra Dews robbed and shot a man at a Travelodge motel while Richardson was with her in the room, it led to charges and then a conviction for both of them. Richardson was sentenced to a minimum of 26 years in prison as an accomplice to robbery and first-degree murder. She was a minor when the crime took place and was shuffled around a number of jails for 6 years until the conviction, after which she was moved to CCWF.
On June 29, 2020, Richardson returned to society. After nearly two decades behind bars, her sentence was commuted following a petition she filed under the new SB 1437 bill. She maintained that she had no intent to aid and abet a robbery. The legislation lessens penalties for accomplices in felony murders, especially among those with no malice aforethought Malice could be understood in two ways: express and implied. Express malice is where a person intended to cause death or grievous bodily harm to another. Implied malice is where a person was committing a felony or death resulting from a depraved indifference to human life. A killing does not qualify as murder in the first degree unless it was committed after premeditation and deliberation. — intention to kill or harm.
A year and a half later, Richardson now lives in a studio apartment in Koreatown with her mother. She says their apartment is not much bigger than her prison cell, but it is full of life. Plants line the windowsills, cover the floors, sit on the nightstands, and crowd the kitchen counters.
Richardson also surrounds herself with plants at work. She is employed full-time as the director of gardening for Huma House, a reentry nonprofit in Los Angeles. Their gardening arm, Angel City Urban Farms, procures gardening and landscaping jobs through private contractors, then hires and trains reentry women to do the work. Through her position at Huma House, Richardson hopes to change the narrative surrounding incarceration.
Alluding to the name of the nonprofit, Richardson explains that, “Huma is a phoenix-like mythical bird and it wraps its wings around those who are in need.”
Symbolically, she says, “Our DNA has been transformed through trauma. So what we're doing is we're reversing that trauma by creating new and healthy experiences.”
The gardening work is sacred to her. She has a special place in her heart for the vibrant fuschia blooms of bougainvilleas, vining shrubs with sharp thorns that are not initially visible. She says she wants to feel the heartbeat of the earth and the soil between her fingers, and speaks of the properties of different plants with animated hand gestures and luminous eyes.
“A lot of the plants have medicinal purposes. They’re good for sore throats, kidney disease and venereal disease. And to help women after childbirth, you can make salves and put them on wounds,” Richardson says.
“Gardening,” she adds, helps people “on so many different levels. It helps you to think better and helps you to breathe better.”
The Huma House team have hired two women so far, at a pay rate of $30 an hour, and are in the process of building a crew of reentry women gardeners. Richardson is now leading workshops for other women to plant and prune gardens, which she calls "soil therapy programs". Her mission is to create jobs and healing spaces for formerly incarcerated 'Formerly incarcerated' is the preferred term. Words like ex-con, former criminal, ex-offender, ex-inmate are considered dehumanizing and stereotypical labels. women like herself.
“We're starting other projects where we're going to be able to hire more people and [with training] we're going to raise [workers with] the skill set up to $50 an hour,” Richardson said.