Your article about the prisoner rehabilitation project LandWorks, excellent though it was, arguably placed too much emphasis on nature as the chief factor accounting for the project’s undoubted success (‘A natural antidepressant’: how working with the land is helping ex-prisoners, 16 August).
I have been a keen supporter of the project since it was set up 12 years ago. The remarkably low reoffending rate (5%) seems to me to be due largely to participants being treated with respect, together with the wraparound care they receive while working at LandWorks. This ranges, as the article explains, from help with accommodation to finding work.
I am sure that, with the same dedication and kindness, a similar project could be set up in the middle of a city, also with remarkably low costs.
Gillian Hamilton
Budleigh Salterton, Devon
• I read the article about LandWorks with joy. I know the project and the effect it has on people. Margaret Thatcher brought in the “community care” initiative in 1983, closing psychiatric hospitals and selling off farmland.
I was a psychiatric nurse. My patients loved working and being on the hospital’s farm – it gave them a reason to get up in the morning. Cut to Bristol city later that year: lots of the long-stay patients were placed in the local “community”, with nowhere to go all day, and only the promise of a fry-up in a local cafe. After that they were left on their own. So we made a place, Windmill Hill city farm, where they could come – it was just a secondhand caravan on some farmland with a former psychiatric nurse (me) on hand.
It worked, and still does more than 40 years later. Give people an opportunity to belong, and to matter. Sow the seeds and watch them grow. People need to belong to feel hope. That’s why “land works”.
Juliana Dart
Poundsgate, Devon
• The obvious question is that if this works, why not have gardening clubs in schools, and set up schemes for youngsters to work with allotment groups or to tend a patch themselves? Imagine how much money would be saved. Add in fishing, which has also reduced recidivism. If people have a purpose and a connection to a community, it stops antisocial behaviour. In 10 years someone will do a research project and get paid to tell us these actions work. Do it now. A small investment will have a big impact.
Heather Penny-Larter
Swindon, Wiltshire
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