The sky is grey over California’s most infamous jail. Rain threatens. In the West Block Yard of San Quentin, a dozen inmates deal with their dogs.
Chase Benoit and Travis Fendley are working with Wendel, a black Labrador.
Benoit, who has put in seven years at “The Q,” a part of his 16 years to life sentence, walks ahead about 25 paces, turns and calls out: “Wendel, here, here.”
By now, Benoit has educated and lived with Wendel for a 12 months, in a jail puppy elevating program that has modified the 28-year-old’s life behind bars. So it appears automated when Wendel promptly lopes over from Fendley to Benoit’s aspect, the place he’s rewarded with a biscuit.
“Very nice, right on,” says James Dern, the nationwide director of puppy packages for Santa Rosa-based Canine Companions, which gives free service dogs to individuals with disabilities.
Dern, who’s overseeing the coaching on this Friday, began speaking with officers in 2017 to carry the Canine Companions jail program to San Quentin. Administrative turnover after which the COVID-19 pandemic stalled that effort. But it was revived by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s California Model initiative to rework the state’s jail system into one centered on rehabilitation fairly than solely punishment.
The jail is now named San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, and its puppy elevating program is in full swing.
Fendley, who has spent 4 years at San Quentin, takes Wendel off to a field the inmates constructed the place the dogs can relieve themselves. Benoit says of his four-legged cost: “He’s helped me with being more responsible and just making me feel, you know, less incarcerated, like I’m not in prison when I’m working with him. It’s humanizing.”
These inmates are outlined not by the crimes that despatched them to jail however by what they create to the jail puppy elevating program, and what it’s achieved for them.
The yard is bordered on two sides by cell blocks that, oddly, evoke cathedrals, with excessive, inward-sloping beige partitions that include tall, slim home windows. On one other aspect is a eating corridor. Behind the place the lads are lined up with their dogs is a cluster of low white and tan buildings fronted by a chain-link fence and razor wire, past which inexperienced hills are seen.
Higher success fee
Canine Companions, a $45 million nonprofit, began its first jail program in 1995 in what’s now Coffee Creek Correctional Center in Wilsonville, Oregon. The organization now has 15 such packages in operation, together with San Quentin’s.
Dogs educated in jail, Dern says, have a ten% better success fee at turning into full-fledged service dogs than different candidates. (Many Canine Companions dogs that don’t make it to that degree go on to work as remedy, search and rescue or medical alert dogs.)
“It has a lot to do with the amount of time and care that our incarcerated puppy raisers take with the project,” Dern says. “They take it really seriously. And, you know, they tend to be really competitive, which is great. And they tend to be really highly skilled.”
Puppy raisers — out and in of prisons — undergo canine conduct and canine studying idea courses, specializing in topics together with physique language, a canine’s emotional state and the way to make sure they’re engaged with the handler.
Says Dern: “I see our puppy raisers at San Quentin actually making good selections for the dogs so the canine does not find yourself training behaviors that may be problematic for service dogs. Not being overstimulated once they meet individuals, training greetings which can be calm and sustaining responsiveness to the handler is basically vital.
“A lot of these skills and behaviors are things that dogs don’t just know. They need to learn it and they learn it by being provided experiences that are enjoyable for them, that they are successful in. And that takes foresight and it takes patience, and those are the skills” that the incarcerated trainers possess, Dern says.
