This is their great outdoors. This is where inmates go, for a couple of hours a day, to step out into the world, and turn their backs to it. Life inside means a life completely controlled. Incoming and outgoing mail is read. Movements are monitored by video camera.
Conversations can be overheard through ceiling microphones.
They are living under an authoritative structure. Now, after earning her high school equivalency diploma, completing classes in computers and in horticulture, and, generally, behaving herself for so many years, Reynolds is a minimum-security prisoner. She is free to leave the prison, but not its grounds, unattended, and go to her garden. It's not freedom that you and I have every single day. She can go out, but she must come back.