Handling with care: By training service dogs, ACI inmates help others
CRANSTON, R.I. — On Tuesday morning, two dozen inmates filed into the cafeteria at the John J. Moran Medium Security Prison. There were 13 dogs in the room with them.
But the dogs weren’t there to guard the inmates; the inmates were there because they train the dogs.
The dogs’ behavior was evidence of the trainers’ work. Each yellow or black Labrador retriever, ages four months to 1½ years old, sat or lay down at its trainer’s feet, never trying to leave. They ignored the food on a table across the room. At any sudden applause or other sound, their only move was to look up and check with their handler.
A review of the roster of successful dog training schools would not be expected to include a state prison, but since 2005, the Moran unit has emerged as the biggest training center for Princeton, Mass.- based National Education for Assistance Dog Services, which provides trained dogs to hearing impaired and disabled people.
The dogs, and about 80 human beings, were at Moran to mark the 10th anniversary of the the "Prison Pup Partnership," where selected inmates get an eight-week-old puppy and keep it for more than a year, teaching a range of 60 commands, from sitting and staying to how to open a refrigerator, take out a bottle and close the door.
NEADS Chief Executive Officer Gerry DeRoche said the training is not for fun. People who eventually get a NEADS dog are physically or psychologically disabled and could be in a situation where their lives will depend on the dog’s response.
“This is a job” for the dogs, he said. “These are not pets.”
Sasha is not a pet to Karen Lohr. She works in the University of Connecticut’s residential life department and was at Moran Tuesday to thank the program that put her and Sasha together.
Lohr is partially paralyzed in both arms and legs, a condition that makes simple things, like picking up house keys or taking off a jacket, difficult.
Sasha, a Moran graduate, can push elevator buttons, turn lights on and off and find Lohr’s cellular phone for her. Having the dog in her life has meant she can live on her own, Lohr said, and hold down a job.
“She’s been a life-changer,” Lohr said.
NEADS has been working with prisons in Massachusetts since the 1980s and came to Rhode Island in 2005, after corrections department Director A. T. Wall heard about the program. Today, 13 of NEADS’ 75 dogs in training are at Moran, making the unit NEADS' largest single training center.
Walt Whitman was the warden at Moran in 2005 and volunteered his unit. Nelson Lefebvre, then a captain at Moran and now the warden at the intake center, agreed to run it.
Lefebvre said they started slow, with two eight-week-old yellow labs assigned to two carefully selected inmates.
On that first day, the puppies huddled nervously on the grounds at Moran, Lefebvre recalled. One inmate he knew well, a man who had spent most of his life in either the Adult Correctional Institutions or the Training School, asked if he could pet them. Lefebvre said sure.
“Then the puppy did what a puppy does, it started licking him all over,” Lefebvre said. “There were tears in his eyes.”
“I said, ‘It’s been a long time?’ and he said ‘It’s been a really long time,’ ” Lefebvre said. “That made me feel, this is going to work.”
The dogs are housebroken before they come to the ACI and sleep in crates in the inmates' cells. They get trained in 10-minute sessions run repeatedly over the course of a day; longer sessions stress the dogs out. The training takes more than a year.
The inmates train the dogs Monday through Friday; on weekends, the dogs go to trainers outside the prison for stints at malls, train stations and airports for acclimation.
Christy Bassett, NEADS’ in-house trainer, said individual trainers may be given specific instructions for a dog; for instance, she had one inmate slur his words to prepare the dog for a client who couldn’t speak clearly.
John Moon, NEADS' director of client programs and community engagement, said labs are used because they are easy-going and enjoy human company, even strangers, which makes them lousy guard dogs. They are excellent retrievers; able to carry an egg in their mouth without breaking it. They are very “food motivated,” he said, happy to learn a new task if there’s an edible reward.
Not all dogs chosen for the program graduate. Moon said about 55 percent of the dogs who start training become service dogs. DeRoche said most learn the commands, but may not show the needed maturity and high level of reliability a service dog must have.
Wall said the program benefits inmates by teaching responsibility, patience and the value of working toward, and accomplishing, a long-term goal. Whitman said the dogs have produced unexpected morale benefits, noting that discipline problems declined in areas where the puppies lived.
“It exceeded our hopes,” Wall said of the program. “It has been a gift to the corrections department. Everyone behaves better around a dog. They are bearers of unconditional love. They don’t care who you are, where you’ve been or what you’ve done.”
