Welcome to Prison!

Canine Partners for Life, established 1989

  It is pretty obvious that puppies are awesome. I mean, you can be in the worst mood ever, see a puppy and you cannot help but smile. Dogs in general can do pretty amazing things, from sensing oncoming storms, to sniffing out bombs, and for people like myself they can sense oncoming medical issues. But what would you think if I told you that there is an organization that raises and trains service dogs to help people with disabilities, and that half of those dogs spend the first year of their lives in a maximum security prison being raised by the prisoners? For Canine Partners for Life in Cochranville, Pennsylvania, that’s precisely the case.

   The Prison Puppy Raising Program was created in 2001 at the Maryland Correctional Institute for Women in Jessup, Maryland. When asked about the program and how it impacts the puppies and the prisoners, Canine Partners dog trainer, Annie Savo says “it gives inmates a purpose and a way to give back to society” and that “the puppies…bring a positive additive to a place that can be pretty grim.”

   While half of the puppies spend their first year in a prison, the other half spend their time in a local home with a family raising them and giving them their first basic set of skills. My dog, Zido, was one of those that had a community home with a mom and a daughter who raised him. I love being able to reach out to them and let them follow our story through my pictures and blog posts. They say that it is such a relief to see the naughty little puppy that they had to install baby-safe cabinet locks on their cabinets once he learned how to open them now literally saving my life every day. Canine Partners wants to make sure, however, that each dog becomes exposed to the different environments of a prison and a community home, so for one month of the first year, they do what is called a “puppy swap” and will switch the dogs from homes to prisons and vice versa. So I guess it is pretty cool to say that my boy spent a year behind bars.

   The following video gives a brief snapshot of the Canine Partners for Life organization as a whole. Stay tuned for a more in depth look into the Prison Puppy Program and what the inmates, puppies, and future partners can come out of it with.