This Bus Offers Prison Families a Free Ride and Farm Food

Home to more than 50 correctional institutions and about 77,000 prisoners, New York is no stranger to incarceration. The state is also big, making it extremely difficult for prisoners' families to visit their loved ones. For years, the Department of Corrections (DOC) operated a free bus program that shuttled family members to prisons and then returned them to the city. But in 2011, the DOC shut the program down due to budgetary concerns.

For farmer, activist, and prison abolitionist Jalal Sabur, the change in policy was unacceptable. Luckily, Sabur had recently come into possession of a school bus. With the help of some of his activist friends, Sabur converted the bus to run on vegetable oil, spruced it up, and painted it with colorful murals. He figured he'd try to pick up where the state left off, driving families to prisons all over New York, then returning them to their homes in the city and in Westchester. And since Sabur—who formerly farmed at the Wassaic Community Farm in the Harlem Valley—was troubled by the low-income community's lack of access to fresh, healthy food, he figured, why not offer some farm produce to families that rode his bus? During the rides, family members can purchase $50 worth of New York farm produce, which they can pay for with EBT and choose to keep or gift to their incarcerated family member.

Thus was the genesis of the Victory Bus Project, the centerpiece of the Freedom Food Alliance that Sabur helped found around 2009. An informal group of activists, farmers, and political prisoners, the Alliance was inspired by Sabur's contact with Herman Bell, a former member of the Black Liberation Army who has been incarcerated since 1973 after being convicted of killing two New York City police officers. Though Bell maintains his innocence, he has been denied parole five times. While in prison in Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, NY, Bell collaborated with Maine farmers to create the Victory Gardens Project, which for eight years distributed organic, locally grown produce to both prisoners and community members in the northeast.

Though still an informal service—it operates a monthly trip to Sullivan and weekly trips to other New York State prison "hubs"—the Alliance's Victory Bus Project recently received a generous grant from the Elias Foundation, which Sabur believes will help kick it into high gear this year. We spoke with him about the prison-industrial complex, the urban-rural connection, and more.

MUNCHIES: How did you first get in touch with Herman Bell, and how did he help inspire the Alliance? One of the farmers had a relationship with Herman, who was in Sullivan at the time. I think all the Alliance stuff came out of going to see Herman and talking with him. We were wondering, What are we gonna call this group? and I came up with the idea of Freedom Food Alliance, and we started building off of that.

At the same time that we got our bus, the government cut the funding for the free bus program, which affected over 2,000 people that were using it monthly. When it got cut, those folks that were using it had no way to afford transportation to prisons. And so we were just like, OK, can we do that? Then, it was like: that's the plan, let's use it to take families up, but also to make food a part of the trips.

So that was my thing: getting the food, the families, talking about the relationship between food justice and prison justice, and how a lot of the same communities that don't have access to food are the same communities that have these high incarceration rates. And talking about the fact that folks are dying not only because they don't have access to healthy food, but also because of state violence and police violence. A lot of the prisons in New York State are on really good, viable farmland. Talking about reversing that relationship was a big part of what we wanted to do.

We have people on the bus for at least two hours, so what can we talk about during that time? Can we talk about different food justice issues? Can we talk about visiting rights for the families, and what they're going through? Can we talk about parole issues, and how the parole system is broken?

Yeah, it sounds like there's the potential to cover a lot of ground in those kinds of discussions. How have they been going? So far, the conversations have been really informal. We'll start off by talking about access to food, and sort of lead into talking about issues of incarceration. There's no pressure to have this conversation: it's not like we're spending the whole trip going, "Oh, the prison system is terrible." Sometimes we just talk about the food, and what to do with it. The point is that they're personal and meaningful [conversations], and bringing it back to that connection: that the same communities that are being highly policed and highly incarcerated still have a lack of access to food.

So how do you decide what to include in the baskets you sell? We try to make sure to have staples in the baskets—things like carrots, potatoes, onions, garlic, that kind of stuff. Hearty greens, apples, and sometimes stuff like maple syrup and honey, when it's available. So it's stuff that people know. I'm also trying to figure out how to have more conversations about seasonality—talking about how we might not have tomatoes in the wintertime, but this is from New York, and it's local, and it's fresh. The prisoners love anything they can get that's not prison food—so it's always a treat for them.

So essentially, the Victory Bus project has taken over a role that the DOC used to play. Do you think it could have found a way to continue its free bus program had it wanted to? I think there's always money if you wanna do something, and if they wanted to have it, I think they could have found the money for it. There always seems to be money for politicians' pet projects, right? Building bridges or whatever it is?

You have a point there. So, Herman Bell has said that only through collective self-help can people improve their conditions. How would you say that sentiment has informed the Alliance's mission? My point of view has been around self-determination, and I think that farming is a form of self-determination. I think that nowadays, we don't know how to produce things, and we're not as self-reliant as we used to be. Through the loss of these types of activities, our communities are not as tight as they used to be; we're all on individualistic paths. Herman sees that that has hurt our movement, so I think that collective self-reliance is the key to getting back to knowing how to provide for our own communities, and knowing how to work together to solve some of the issues that continue to divide us, and hurt us.