By Irene Rotondo
masslive.com
NORFOLK, Mass. — At Pondville Correctional Center, tens of thousands of honeybees are hard at work inside wooden boxes about 40 yards from the facility, their buzzing audible to the inmates in the yard.
By next spring, a dozen incarcerated men hope to don protective suits to join them and learn the art of beekeeping, as part of the Massachusetts Department of Correction’s first prison program on the topic — a dream finally taking flight after a decade, thanks to a retired English teacher’s belief that these small creatures can teach the largest life lessons.
“What makes a good beekeeper is someone who can plan and have impulse control, who can focus, be mindful, calm and curious. They need to be involved in nature, be interested in themself and others, and have empathy,” said Susan Goldwitz, 75.
“These were qualities that I realized that people I was teaching at the correctional facilities would benefit from — it’s exactly what I want my students who are incarcerated to be learning about,” Goldwitz said.
Pondville Correctional Center in Norfolk is a minimum security, pre-release facility that houses up to 160 male inmates. As the men prepare to return to society after their time served, they participate in numerous programs, such as assistance-dog training, online education and English-language workshops, vocational training for automotive work and OSHA and more.
Beekeeping will be one of the newest programs at Pondville and the only one in the state, as it’s still in its pilot phase.
The hives are located near an outdoor track ring in an area that was once scrubland — dotted with wasp nests, stones and dirt — but has now been transformed into something resembling a shrine. The site is complete with a New England stone wall, gravel path and pollinating plants that surround two thriving beehives.
They are currently tended to by Best Bees, a professional beekeeping service that installs and manages beehives on residential and commercial properties around the country.
This partnership that Goldwitz pioneered between Best Bees and the Massachusetts Department of Corrections (DOC) aims to ultimately allow about a dozen incarcerated men per year to learn from the professional beekeepers and classroom curriculum on the art — which “checks all of the boxes on the re-entry front,” said DOC Commissioner Shawn Jenkins.
“This particular program is unique because it gets folks outside and engaging with nature, giving them an opportunity to develop skills that help when they re-enter back into the communities,” Jenkins said.
Without Goldwitz’s persistence and help, the program would never have gotten off the ground, he said.
“We can’t do this alone, right? We’re part of the community like any other state agency ... Here at the DOC, for us to provide good re-entry services, we need help from the community and people to engage from the community to make these things successful, and we can’t thank our partners enough,” Jenkins said.
Goldwitz is a retired English teacher who’s spent time over the past decade volunteering at prisons across Massachusetts, including MCI Concord and the South Middlesex Correctional Center. There, she taught inmates poetry, essays and “how to stretch their minds a bit.”
She previously worked with a program called “Changing Lives Through Literature” at Roxbury District Court, which focused on rehabilitation for people on probation.
In 2013, Goldwitz took up beekeeping. Two years later, as she began working with incarcerated individuals — whom she describes as curious, engaged and eager to grow — she started what would be a decade of advocating to bring beekeeping into Massachusetts prisons.
She has long viewed Pondville as the ideal setting for this initiative, as she believes the pre-release facility plays a meaningful role in supporting inmates’ positive reentry into society.
“If you’re an English teacher, you find out very quickly that bees have been a symbol since before many poets — Dickinson, Keats have used bees as symbols, because bees are like artists,“ Goldwitz said.
“They take different ingredients — dried pollen and nectar — and make something beautiful, like artists make art for their community to be shared,” she said.
As the program is still in its pilot phase, inmates have not yet been allowed to participate in the beekeeping. However, Goldwitz plans to meet with Joseph Salvucci, director of treatment at Pondville, in the next two weeks to begin putting together a classroom curriculum on beekeeping.
If all goes as planned, about a dozen inmates can begin that classroom work by February next year, then move to hands-on fieldwork with the two hives next spring, Salvucci said.
Through this program, the inmates will learn how to treat and manage beehives, collect honey and keep the bees happy and healthy. At Pondville, that honey will be collected in jars and donated to local food pantries, Salvucci said. There’s a chance the inmates themselves might get to eat it, or use it in their culinary program.
While there won’t be any pre-requisites for inmates who wish to join the program, participants will be screened for bee allergies and should be within 18 months of their release or parole.
It will be considered a low-risk alternative program, not part of the facility’s core programming, Salvucci said, and a private donation will cover its first year. If all goes well, Goldwitz plans to later use her own hives for the program and make it self-sustaining.
Even in its pilot stage, the beekeeping program has sparked intense interest among inmates, with many eager to get involved.
“They’ve been asking tens and tens — hundreds — of questions about how they can get into the program,” said Salvucci. “It’s generating a lot of interest, and that’s the main goal: to generate interest and curiosity and, hopefully, turn this into a skill that they can utilize when they get out.”
Though the inmates haven’t yet been allowed close to the hives, the idea of beekeeping has already taken hold. They’ve noticed dragonflies, bumblebees and the honeybees flocking to their garden since the hives arrived — a space now overflowing with their dozens of vegetable varieties, including tomatoes, eggplants and carrots grown for local food pantry donations.
Often, inmates gather to watch as professionals from Best Bees tend to the hives — and their curiosity shows.
“They ask the best questions,” said Goldwitz, along with Salvucci and Best Bees beekeepers Meg Murphy and Spencer Mangiacotti.
“I think that having a way to work with your hands and work with nature will really reconnect someone with who they are as a person,” Murphy said. She stood next to Mangiacotti on Tuesday, after they’d just finished a treatment on the hives. Bees swarmed around their heads, sometimes landing softly on their keeper suits.
“It’s really been a very cool experience to be able to come out to these grounds and work on bees in a way that we’re familiar with, and be able to pass on that knowledge and experience of working outside ... to be able to share that experience,” she said.
Mangiacotti agreed, adding he enjoyed how beautiful the site was and inmates’ eagerness to already be involved — many of whom were the ones to put in the site landscaping work.
“It’s great. People here come out when we visit often, and will watch us and hold frames and ask questions. It’s always fun to share that with people,” he said.
For Goldwitz, she hopes this art will teach the inmates “a new hobby, a new something to talk about, bring to their community to help families and gardens there.”
They’re learners who are eager to participate, she said, and capable of growth when given meaningful opportunities.
“If we want to reduce recidivism, it makes sense to provide people who are incarcerated with something interesting that they can look forward to — and not just looking forward to being released, but something interesting in their lives in the future,” she said.
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