The 6-story jail had a rundown, Art Deco façade. On the inside, in addition to massive overcrowding, sewage leaked, drinking water was unsafe, and air vents were full of asbestos. The heaters and radiators were broken, as were most of the dozens of windows facing the cold air coming off the Pacific. Inmates used to stuff toilet paper into the gaps in the windows to block the wind. The jail was rife with violence, with petty thieves housed in the same areas as violent offenders and gang members. There were also accusations of guards taking inmates to the elevators, which had no cameras, to beat them.
A federal judge had ruled that the City and County of San Francisco Jail No. 3 was so decrepit that it violated inmates’ constitutional rights, including the 8th amendment about cruel and unusual punishment. Under duress, San Francisco agreed to build a completely new jail in 1999 – to be constructed on the site of the existing jail, while it was still operating.
The runoff from the construction site drained directly into federally protected wetland, home to a federally protected species, the California red-legged frog. I was hired by the construction management company to make sure nothing happened to the frogs or the wetland – because if more than four frogs were killed during the course of the project, it would be shut down.
This risk is why one of the project requirements was for every single worker on site to watch a 15-minute video about the frog and site protection before they started.
This is also how I became known to several hundred construction workers as The Frog Lady.
Not gonna lie, to most people on the site, the frog was a joke. While a small part of my job was checking storm drains for errant frogs, mostly it was about protecting the wetland. Keeping out dirt, all kinds of substances, and people. For instance, one day somebody accidentally connected the sewer line from the laundry room in the existing jail to our storm drain system and bubbly foam starting pouring out of the pipes into the wetland. Other times, I had to chase down people dumping things on the ground they weren’t supposed to or going into off-limits area. Essentially, I had to check that workers were doing everything by the book, which didn’t always make me a welcome vision around the jobsite.
I loved walking the property though. Located in a foggy suburb 30 miles south of San Francisco, the site was flanked to the east by a residential neighborhood, and to the west by coastal mountains – home to deer, red tail hawks, red-shouldered hawks with their black-and-white-striped tail feathers, skunks. I had to be careful about going out to the far edges of the site on my own in the late afternoon because of the bobcats.
At the foot of the mountain, on the jail property just past the wetland, was an organic farm. In the early 80s, a Sheriff’s Department employee, Catherine Sneed, started a program for the inmates, transforming an abandoned farm to a training program and abundant garden that donated food to needy families.
By the early 90s, she had founded a nonprofit called the Garden Project to employ those same people once they were out of jail. They worked at that farm and at another garden adjacent to police station in San Francisco, and planting over 10,000 street trees in the City.
Before the Garden Project, the jail was a revolving door: 80% of inmates would end up back in there. Some were arrested dozens of times. Remarkably, once a person was a part of the Garden Project, something changed for them. Less than 25% of the people in the program had further offenses. Catherine always said she doesn’t teach farming or horticulture, she teaches work. It’s not just that the Garden Project gets people in touch with nature and plants, it’s that it provides employment and a way for people to provide for their families. I got to know some of the people working on the farm and saw first-hand what it meant to them.
I also experienced first-hand how hard it is to create to new habitat once its lost. The footprint of new jail extended onto an acre of the wetland. To make up for this, we had to build a new frog breeding habitat on the far side of the wetland, away from the construction site, nicknamed the frog pond.
This was the early 2000s and habitat creation had never been done for this species before – it had rarely been done for any species. I worked with a team of experts including a herpetologist to get everything about the pond just right. The pond had to be deep enough to hold water for several months, yet not so deep that the frogs wouldn’t be able to lay their eggs in it. After the heavy equipment dug the hole for the pond, it would need to be planted with specific native plants to provide the right conditions, the right ambiance if you will, for frog…lovemaking? Procreation.
We hired three guys from the Garden Project to do the planting. They were brothers and had been working there for years. The Garden Project had changed their trajectory, especially the oldest brother. In his late 50s, he had been a junkie and been arrested many times. But not anymore. They did their work diligently and exactly as we asked. Out of their own interest, they checked on the plants and the pond every time they were out there.
I’d like to be able to tell you there was fairytale ending for the frog pond, but it didn’t work out that way. The pond was deep enough for the frogs to lay eggs; we saw lots of them. But it wasn’t deep enough to prevent racoons from treating it like an all-you-can-eat-frog-egg-buffet. Every morning their little raccoon footprints would be all over the mud and the eggs would be gone. There were no tadpoles that first season.
However, I am proud to say that no frogs were killed or injured during my tenure. That project had its fair share of setbacks, but the frogs were not one of them. This made enduring all the frog jokes worth it (believe me, I have heard them all).
Unexpectedly, this job helped me to reconnect with an important part of myself. When I started the job, I was coming off a three-year stint working as a copywriter during the San Francisco dot-com boom, which had abruptly busted. I thought I wanted to be a fiction writer and was apply to MFA programs. Several months into the frog job, I found out the only program I got into was my extra-super-backup-last-choice. It forced me to take another look at my options. I knew it making a living as a fiction writer would be tough. Meanwhile every day I was using what I learned in college getting my degree in Environmental Studies. Working at the base of a mountain every day and getting real experience mitigating the impacts of building on the environment felt like going back to my roots.
This is also when a new professional accreditation in green building emerged. I learned so much about construction at this job that I was able to pass the exam for this accreditation, known as LEED, and get another job working on some of the first big green building projects in the Bay Area. This was the catalyst for me to build a career that I have loved in the two decades since. And I still get to write.
It's not a fairytale but there are a few morals to this story:
First, it’s cheaper, easier, and more reliable to protect nature areas than to try to re-create them. I recently shared on here about rewilding, which is about letting nature do its thing so it can heal itself. Rewilding is wonderful, but protecting nature in the first place is the best. When we lose habitat, we lose species – and we no matter the effort we put in, we might not able to fix it.
Second, we have proof that giving former offenders the opportunity to work dramatically reduces the chance they will commit crimes again. Yet, as a society, we still spend our money building more jails and not on breaking this cycle. The US Dept. of Agriculture called the Garden Project, “…one of the most innovative and successful community-based crime prevention programs in the country.” We know there’s another way forward and we need to take it.
Lastly, we shouldn’t be afraid of pivots, of changing our mind. I don’t regret any of the time I spent trying for other things. Sometimes we work hard for something or follow a dream then find that it wasn’t what thought, we don’t love it like we thought we would, or it doesn’t work out. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other dreams, other doors to walk through, and other happy endings that we couldn’t have even imagined, just waiting for us to take the leap.
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Further reading:
The Garden Project
The California red-legged frog
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