Incarcerated Women & Buttery Redemption

One of the greatest failures of our generation is crime against incarcerated men and women. 

There is nothing even remotely close to rehabilitation nor reformation for these people. Loss of complete life while living, disintegration of families, economic cost and worst perpetuating cycle of violence. 

I am glad there is some hope with this change. No surprise, this is coming via our fellow sentient beings we share the planet with. This is just hope for incarcerated people but maybe a precursor to who we rewrite our economics and how we work. 

Heather wears her dark hair in braids. She’s also wearing a bright red sweater marked DOC for Department of Corrections, identifying her as an inmate of Mission Creek Corrections Center for Women, a minimum security prison located near Belfair, Washington. Heather is not her real name. She says she feels lucky to be participating in this work while she serves her sentence here. She shows me around with a proud, almost parental smile. Along with eight other incarcerated women, Heather is entrusted with the care and feeding of nearly 4,000 members of an endangered species, the Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly. With this trust comes the privilege of working just beyond the razor-wire fence during the day before returning to life among the general prison population each night.

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Recognizing the need for urgent action, the Oregon Zoo began a captive breeding program for the species in 2003. In 2011, the zoo helped establish the breeding program at Mission Creek as part of The Evergreen State College and Washington State’s Sustainability in Prisons Project. Since then, the work undertaken by these incarcerated women has become one of the last best hopes for the species’ survival.

On this mid-March morning, the air inside the program’s two greenhouses is warm compared with the shade of the surrounding forest and the adjacent prison yard. Metal racks containing hundreds of identical plastic cups house hungry caterpillars waiting to be fed the leafy green plantain the women grow in a garden outside.

After spending six months in a hibernation-like state known as diapause, the caterpillars roused in late January and have been busy bulking up ever since. After they’re released, they will continue to eat and grow through mid-March to mid-April, after which they’ll pupate beneath dry wood and vegetation and undergo metamorphosis. Their chrysalises, with cream-and-gray bands alternating with orange and black dots, offer a pastel preview of the butterfly to come. Only a few chrysalises have been found in the wild. In April or May, they emerge as adults and take to the air on wings of vivid red or orange and white, outlined in black, calling to mind the brightly hued geometry of stained-glass windows. Their life as butterflies is fleeting—just one to 14 days—but they use that time to mate and lay clusters of approximately 100 bright yellow, quinoa-sized eggs that take on a maroon hue before hatching. A single butterfly can lay up to 1,000 eggs. From those eggs, new caterpillars will appear, fatten up, enter diapause in June or July, and then awaken in January or February to, hopefully, continue the cycle in the wild.

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“When I told my family what I do,” Brooke explains, “they said, ‘we’re so proud of you, that you are doing something that has such a profound mission in the world.’” She finds the work meditative, and despite the “shocking” amount of data she must record, she says the work provides a feeling of satisfaction at the end of the day.

Heather agrees, and admits the job is also on her mind at night. “I literally have dreams about being able to sleep in these greenhouses.”

Over the course of about a week, most of the caterpillars are taken away for release in the wild. For the women who raised them, it’s surprisingly hard to let go.

“I just didn’t think you could form a bond with an insect like that,” Heather declares. “I cried yesterday, saying goodbye.”

Before they leave, she has a message for them: the fate of the species is riding on your shoulders. “You got this,” she says.