A Guiding Hand

Photograph by Valerie Schaff

Four years ago, Gloria Gilbert Stoga quit her job as an aide to New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani to start Puppies Behind Bars, a nonprofit organization that trains prison inmates to raise guide dogs for the blind.

Ms. Stoga became interested in the training of guide dogs after she adopted a Labrador retriever that had been taught to work with the blind but never had the chance to do so because of medical problems. She started to read about the special care and training of guide dogs and came across an article about an Ohio guide-dog school that successfully paired inmates with puppies. The program worked in part because the prisoners had lots of time to lavish attention on the dogs.

Impressed by the need for more trained guide dogs, Ms. Stoga persuaded several guide-dog schools and the New York State Department of Correctional Services to start a similar program in New York, and now a prison in New Jersey has also joined the training program. The 35 dogs that are trained over 16-month periods have improved the prison atmosphere as well as the behavior of inmates because the puppies help the prisoners learn patience, responsibility, and how to work as a team, says Ms. Stoga.

“As the dogs become mature and confident, you see parallel growth in inmates,” she says.

The charity works with corrections officials to choose the prisoners most likely to be responsible enough to train and care for the dogs, which live with the inmates in their cells. The inmates and the dogs together attend rigorous classes where the animals learn basic obedience commands as well as a variety of special guide-dog skills, including walking calmly in a crowd and keeping a measured pace while going up or down stairs.

Here, an inmate at a medium-security prison, in New York, bonds with one of the dogs in training.