The Marshall Project

A Juvenile Lifer Finds Peace in the Prison Garden

Bobby Bostick was sentenced to 241 years at age 16. Gardening, he writes, keeps him growing.

Growing up in the ghetto of St. Louis, Missouri, I didn’t see many of nature’s wonders. My neighborhood was full of vacant houses, broken down cars, streetlights that didn’t work and yards with dying grass. There were drug dealers every which way I looked, and gangbangers posted up and down the block. It was more like nature's curse rather than nature’s gift.

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However, there was an exception

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