Training a service dog in prison taught me lessons I never expected.
My heart fluttered as I stared through the window at the beautiful strawberry-blonde Golden Retriever that my senior partner led up the walk. They were now about a hundred feet away from the unit. Within six minutes, I was about to be responsible for another life. Butterflies threw a party inside my stomach. I anticipated this to be the most exciting experience of my bid thus far.
However, my left brain asked what the hell I was thinking. This dog came with a $30,000 price tag, and I barely had a couple hundred dollars in my name. Worse, I could face more criminal charges if anything happened to it; they had just lost a dog on the other side of the compound earlier that month. I was trying to go home as soon as possible, not keep myself there for something else that could be avoided. Not to mention how hard it was to pay off the first few thousand dollars of restitution I had before. The question tormented my mind: what if this was a mistake?
He walked the puppy into our eight-man cube and had her sit before us. Her tail wagged as she looked back up at me with her gorgeous eyes full of fear and promise. She read me for any signs of ill intent and cues to follow. The thumping in my heart settled as my anxiety transmuted into curiosity and excitement. My heart reassured me that this was a step in the right direction: towards taking better care of myself, towards earning my parole, educating myself, and learning a skill that would make me a productive member of society, towards helping and enhancing the lives of disabled people.
Yes, I was about to do something great in producing a service dog. How many people got a chance to transform a simple canine creature into a superhero? If that wasn’t worth taking a risk for, nothing was. The name written on the sticker of her collar read “Sprout.”
At 11:12 A.M., my senior partner locked her inside the kennel beside our bunks and went to use the phone. I couldn’t believe it. Okay, maybe he had a plan. The calls were 15 minutes long. At 11:28 A.M., I pulled Sprout back out of the kennel.
“Alright, it’s been 15 minutes,” I said to Sprout’s lovely face while grinning at her. “We’re not waitin’ for him to make another call.”
I could have sworn she nodded in agreement.
I attached the leash to her orange-red collar and then led her out of the cube to the hallway where everyone else was training their new dogs. My nerves squeezed my heart and limbs from the inside out, but my training prepared me for this moment. I began with “heel,” the very first command of our syllabus, which taught the dog to stand at its handler’s side. I slowly waved my wiggling spirit fingers before her face and watched them lure her into position. She followed my fingers back, then forward, to my left heel, before stopping and smiling up at me, her mouth wide open, her tongue wagging.
I smiled back down at her. “Yeah, this is gonna be fun.”
While walking Sprout outside for her break the following morning, I felt the leash tug tight behind me. Looking back, I realized she stopped inside. Her back was arched upwards, and her tail had risen to make way for what was coming.
“No, no…”
I tried to stop her, but there was nothing I could do. She was already going—doing number two right there in the lobby. I sighed while waiting for her to finish. The putrid stench of canine feces invaded my nostrils. She finished, then looked up at me like she had done no wrong.
I sighed again. “Really? So you’re just gonna take a crap on me like that at six in the morning, huh?”
Maybe she hadn’t done anything wrong. I considered this while grabbing the plastic bread bag from my pocket and scooping the feces off the floor. The warmth of the waste heated my hand through the bag. This was part of the job. She was only being her puppy self. I carried the bag outside and tossed it inside the trash can in front of the housing unit. Then, I walked Sprout back inside, got a towel and a bottle of disinfectant, and cleaned the spot on the floor where she had made the mess. Afterwards, I continued training her like nothing had happened.
About a month later, while walking Sprout outside for another morning bathroom break, I spotted a small white pill on the hallway floor as we approached the lobby. I stopped, pulled her back into the sit position away from it, then picked it up. I’d been monitoring the floors since they warned us a few weeks earlier that some miserable fool was leaving random pills out for dogs to pick up. But seeing it in real-time and knowing that my dog could have ingested it made my heart skip a beat.
I started waking up a half hour early every morning to sweep the floors before any of the dogs went out for bathroom breaks. I hated getting up at 6 A.M., so getting up at 5:30 A.M., without an alarm clock, was almost unbearable. But there was nothing that I wouldn’t do to protect our dogs, especially Sprout. She was my baby.
For the next few months, I taught Sprout more commands like “sit,” “wait,” “stop,” “down,” “come,” ” settle,” and “back,” and each time, it was the most exciting experience for us both. Her little puppy mind was like a blank canvas on which I painted beautiful patterns of repetition. Or better yet, like a fertile field of soil on which I could plant any seeds of desired behavior with consistent training.
When she passed the Canine Good Citizen (CGC) test and earned her certification, I felt like a proud father. Watching her consciousness bloom from that of a wild pet into one of a skilled worker showed me what was possible for Sprout. But I didn’t realize how much I had learned—about Sprout, dog psychology, and myself—until she left.
Sprout actually trained me.
Deyon is serving 30-60 years for assault with intent to commit murder.
Deyon Neal #360091
Carson City Correctional Facility
10274 Boyer Road
Carson City, MI 48811
