Man’s Best Friend Helps Rehabilitate Prisoners in England

Rachel Trafford opens a series of doors at HMP Dovegate, a high security Category B prison in Staffordshire, England. As you enter the prison grounds, you hear dogs barking. But these are not traditional guards trained to sow fear among prisoners and deter potential escapees. They are puppies: the young students of the Restart Dogs project. In November 2021, Dovegate became the first adult prison in England to offer a full-time dog training course.

With a team of professional trainers – and volunteers who care for the puppies in the evenings and weekends – the program trains service dogs for the community. At the same time, it provides men serving significant sentences with the knowledge and qualifications to become dog handlers and trainers.

“We train adult prisoners/offenders to become service dog trainers during their prison sentence, helping to create an altered social identity,” reads the Restart Dogs website.

“By providing the program’s dogs with modern, positive reinforcement-based training, inmates promote responsible animal welfare and effective, non-violent, non-confrontational training, leading students to greater empathy, self-regulation, social skills, compassion, responsibility and respect. ,” he adds.

Service dogs help people with disabilities with everyday tasks, like unloading washing machines or opening doors. Their training can last up to two years. Inside the prison, every day of the week, the program’s nine inmates learn how to teach dogs certain behaviors, like charging, through positive reinforcement.

Cuando Trafford, the general director and founder of Restart Dogs, knows the psychology of canine addiction, can be referred to the penitentiary system: “El castigo suppresses malos behaviors, but no need to create positive behaviors,” affirmed the driver of the cargo ship project. “The only way to create a new neural pathway is to continue to reward it.”

Dan, a former prison drug dealer, was given the opportunity to be part of the project, which encouraged him to quit drugs “overnight”. “What will really reduce the risk of reoffending is not wanting to reoffend,” he says. “We must reduce the desire to consume drugs with significant activity. “It keeps me grounded.” The qualifications gained on the course and the skills you learn paint a picture of what a life away from crime could be like when you leave prison. “There is now a group of prisoners that we no longer have to worry about,” Trafford notes.

“They don’t use drugs, they don’t have incidents, they are easy to manage in the services. Normally, random drug testing is conducted on the entire prison population. If they are in our program, it is mandatory. If they fail, they’re out,” says Trafford. Despite this, only one prisoner was kicked out of the program in the first few days. As the project manager delicately puts it, “they needed to do a little more personal work”.

The College of Policing’s own guidelines on dog training programs for inmates note that “overall, the evidence suggests that the intervention reduced crime”, based on limited information on initiatives such as Restart Dogs and a handful of similar emerging programs.

The program’s first dog to graduate, Nika – trained in part by Dan – was given to Alfred Peterken, a young man with autism, in 2022. “Nika is brilliant,” says Tabitha Peterken, Alfred’s mother, speaking to Magazine Positive news. “When he senses a seizure is coming… if it lasts too long, he takes it away. We were able to sit in cafes and have a drink, which we didn’t do before,” he adds.

Trafford will expand the program to a third prison, Fosse Way, near Leicester, in November, and is creating a charity to help newly released prisoners start their own dog training businesses. With his sentence ending in December 2024, prisoners like Dan will have the opportunity to continue their work when they leave prison.