From the Recipients...

   As I said last time, my service dog was not raised in Canine Partner’s Prison Puppy Program, but many of his friends and even some of his siblings were. I was interested in how the dogs’ partners felt about where their dogs were raised for the first year of their lives. I was able to reach out to many of them through the organization’s Facebook page and asked a few of them about each dog’s experience in the particular prisons.

Me, Zido, Stephen, and Samantha Lorey at Canine Partners for Life in Cochranville, Pennsylvania, August 13, 2014

   Recipient, Samantha Lorey, has been paired with Zido’s brother, Stephen, for one year this June. Stephen spent the first year of his life at Jessup Correctional Institution in Maryland where he was raised by a male prisoner who was sentenced for a maximum security-worthy crime that Lorey is unaware of. I asked her how she felt about not knowing the name of the prisoner who handled the dog she now depends on, and she said that while she would love to know exactly who it was that trained Stephen, she knows that the program is “a great program” and that raising these puppies “provides the prisoners with a great experience.” Actually, all of the recipients that I interviewed about their dogs had pretty much this same answer. Lukah Case, a 16 year old who was training with her dog, Jasper, in the same class that Zido and I trained in, also would love to contact the prisoner in charge of Jasper’s first year, but that “as long as [Jasper is doing his job, she doesn’t] think it really matters where the magic happens.”

16 year old Lukah and her medical alert dog, Jasper in Clinton, Illinois, on March 24, 2015

   Stacy Calvert, whose son, Hunter, was paired with his seizure alert dog, Argos, ten months ago says that she would love to know the names of the two prisoners who raised Argos, but that she understands the safety reasons as to why Canine Partners does not release the names.

Hunter receiving the best kind of kisses from Argos in Punta Gorda, Florida on June 27, 2014

   It is an interesting feeling being paired with these dogs, at least for me, because I spend 24 hours a day with Zido and I learn so much about him every single second. I can no longer imagine my life without him by my side, but I cannot help but feel like I missed out on his first year. His puppy home is AMAZING and I am so glad that they were the ones to see him grow up, but I could not think about how it would feel knowing that a prisoner was the one to watch Zido do his first sit on command or comfort him when he was scared of thunder storms. I wanted to see what these three partners thought about this subject, and all three of them again surprised me. Calvert said that it did not bother her or her son at all that Argos was raised by a “criminal” because “people make mistakes [but they] can change.” Toni Popkins, another recipient whose dog, Bud, was raised in a men’s prison in Laurel, Maryland, said that it makes her feel like “even though they committed a crime, they are not all bad.”

   I think that the best way I have ever heard it put about these dogs and the prisoners that raise them was from a woman who graduated in the same class as Zido and me. Every day we had a time where we would read a journal entry that described our time at training. This woman suffered from severe seizures, and her dog was the first to be able to give her the independence to walk down her driveway in many, many years. She said, “I just realized the irony of it all. My little [dog name] started his life in a prison, only to come to me and release me from mine.”

   Whether Canine Partners’ dogs are raised in a home with a fenced in yard, or in a prison with fences surrounding it, the fact is that these dogs are loved and they save lives every day. Nothing can change that.