Inside America’s least probable prison experiment
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For the first month after Skeets arrived at Green Haven Correctional Facility, Milton hardly slept. He lay awake in his cell, watching the small black Labrador asleep in his crate, checking he was still breathing. He didn’t want to miss any cues to take Skeets outside. All night, men on the cell block called for the officer on duty to let them out into the frozen yard to keep their new puppies from having accidents. They slept with their clothes on. It had been a challenging January. Some of the prison officers, unhappy with the arrival of the five eight-week-old puppies and frustrated by new demands on their time, had refused to let some men out of their cells at night, setting back the house training. The officers talked where they knew they would be overheard. The programme would fail, they said. The prisoners would hurt the dogs.
The prisoners tried to contain their frustration until Friday, when they could tell their teacher what was happening. But every time there was a setback, or another incarcerated man was asked to leave the programme for neglecting the training or for failing a drug test, it seemed to prove what the prisoners most feared: that Puppies Behind Bars (PBB) could never work at Green Haven, one of the toughest maximum-security prisons in the country. Of the 20 men who originally began in PBB in June 2022, only 10 remained seven months later. By the dogs’ graduation the following year, that number would dwindle to four.
PBB was founded in 1997 by Gloria Gilbert Stoga, a former member of Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral administration, to train incarcerated individuals to raise service dogs for wounded veterans, first responders and police officers, many of whom suffer from PTSD or traumatic brain injuries. The programme also trains facility dogs for use by police around the US and explosive-detection canines. It now operates in seven New York prisons, has worked with thousands of incarcerated men and women, and trained over 4,000 dogs.
During the roughly 18-month period in which the dogs live in prison with their “raisers”, they learn nearly 60 commands. They will learn how to “tunnel” when asked, positioning themselves under chairs, and how to push themselves through the legs of handlers having a PTSD episode, grounding them and anchoring them back to the present. The dogs can turn lights on and off and retrieve specific items by name.
Green Haven, an enormous, imposing building in upstate New York, is the largest maximum-security men’s prison the programme has operated in, and by far the most difficult. Almost half the 1,800 men incarcerated in Green Haven are serving life sentences, the highest rate in the state. With little hope of release, despair runs through the concrete halls like a draught. The prison struggles with violence and drug use, a problem that has turned deadlier with the proliferation of the synthetic opiate fentanyl. Facing sentences counted in decades, some men slowly lose their minds. For those who will never leave it, the building is a tombstone.
PBB has strict criteria for applicants to become raisers. Men must have been in the prison for a year and have at least three years left on their sentence. They must have committed no assaults on staff at the prison, received no “tickets” for infractions for a year and never attempted escape. The programme does not accept sex offenders or those who have committed crimes against police, children or animals.
Gilbert Stoga, who had been contemplating retirement, brought the programme into Green Haven herself. “I wanted to do it, because it is the hardest,” she says. Gilbert Stoga trains the incarcerated men, the men train the dogs. Tolerance for excuses is nonexistent. She’s worked in prisons too long to be moved by sad stories and is not interested in her students’ crimes. “My assumption is that most of these guys did very bad things,” she says. “If they want to rehabilitate themselves, that’s great. That’s not what Puppies does . . . I don’t see Puppies offering hope. I see me, as a taxpayer, giving you an opportunity to do something to repay your debt to society.” This isn’t about the men, she says. “If the dogs don’t graduate, I fail.”
But the puppies have an alchemical effect on the prisoners. When other incarcerated men come into contact with the dogs, “you see them in a state of shock”, says James, a raiser almost halfway through a 16-year sentence for manslaughter. “They say, ‘It’s been 25 years since I touched a dog. For a moment . . . I wasn’t here’.”
Class begins the moment Gilbert Stoga arrives at Green Haven each Friday and sees something to correct, which is always immediately. She is thin and taut as a humming, electrified wire. Most weeks she brings in marrow bones as treats for the dogs, as tender with the puppies as she is demanding with the raisers. She is an indefatigable teacher, wearing down anyone who would dare argue with her like water on stone. By the end of the six-hour class, her voice is always hoarse.
I first visited Green Haven in November. When we arrived, Gilbert Stoga’s students were already waiting for her at the entrance to D Block with the one-year-old dogs, the last traces of puppy softness nearly gone from their bodies. The raisers carried mesh bags with toys and towels, kibble holstered in small pouches at their hips.
Skeets immediately jumped at Gilbert Stoga in greeting. His friendliness had made him a favourite inside Green Haven, but pulling on his leash had become an issue. Gilbert Stoga shoved her heavy handbag at me without looking, sent the rest of the group ahead to the classroom and began working with Milton in the hallway. He gently turned Skeets each time he tugged towards Gilbert Stoga. She complimented Milton when he got it right: “Nice phrase, perfect timing”. She directed him to do it again, and again.
That day, the class was celebrating the dogs’ first birthdays by putting on a recital for the prison staff. The guests, a mix of teachers for the college programme, prison administrators and uniformed corrections officers, assembled in front of the barred windows and cinder block walls taped with Alcoholics Anonymous affirmations.
As the class showcased five commands, Gilbert Stoga called on a raiser to explain the utility of each. There was “Peek-a-boo”, which dogs use to interrupt a PTSD attack, and then “Tell Me A Story”. The men sat on the ground in their standard-issue dark green pants, legs spread long. Each dog lay down, resting its head across the raiser’s thigh, staring up at his face and holding eye contact. This command was designed, Gilbert Stoga explained, for use in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. In cases of child abuse, it can be difficult for children to talk to adults about what happened to them. PBB lends dogs in training to the DA’s office to aid in these conversations. The dog lies down with its head in the child’s lap, and the child tells the dog their story.
The dogs bowed and the audience applauded, impressed. The men exhaled, smiling. Glen, a quiet raiser with a raised knife scar yoking the back of his neck, crooned so that no one else would hear, “You’re a good puppy, yes you are.”
After “count” (the entire prison is counted by corrections officers five times a day), the class moved outside. A patchy grass field runs to the base of the towering stone wall, 30 feet high and rumoured to be 30 feet deep, that surrounds Green Haven’s 54 acres like a fortress. The new barbed wire that laced the top of the high fence glinted in the sun. Some raisers threw toys and played tag, others positioned themselves over the deep gopher holes to protect the dogs as they ran. One prisoner sprinted across the field, chased by the pack of dogs. It was an arresting image, but when he cut back towards the class, he was grinning like a boy.
“There are 1,800 men in Green Haven,” Gilbert Stoga told me. “I have 19. Why have these men chosen to do something extraordinary?”
When I first visited Green Haven, the prison superintendent, Mark Miller, sat me down in his office and told me in no uncertain terms never to forget where I was. Long periods of incarceration can turn people into masterful manipulators, he said. Some arrived that way. “There are men in here who have done terrible things and would do them again,” he tells me. Miller is the kind of warden the prisoners say will walk the hallways alone, without an officer. He has worked in corrections since 1992, most of that time in internal affairs, investigating abuses inside New York prisons. Nothing surprises him.
Miller arrived at Green Haven in 2021 determined to bring PBB into the prison. He had heard about a dog that was sent by the programme to help the widow of a fallen police officer. The gesture got to him. “I’m not a bleeding-heart liberal,” he says. “My whole thought was, where are these dogs going, and who are they helping who really needs it?”
There was an operational case as well. Boredom is at the root of much of the worst behaviour in prisons. Miller saw that having programmes such as college in Green Haven kept the men occupied and engaged, and reduced violence, suicides and drug abuse.
In the US, the “internal management” argument that programmes improve the behaviour of prisoners and, therefore, improve the working conditions for staff remains the most politically potent. It is also still considered progressive in a country where many believe violent offenders are not entitled to anything beyond a cell.
Miller understood that in a prison like Green Haven, rehabilitation meant something different. With most programmes, “I know we’re trying to prepare them for the street,” he says. “But I’m trying to prepare them for prison.”
The trouble, his deputy head of programming told him, was that Gilbert Stoga had visited the prison before, 20 years ago, under a different warden who was unenthusiastic about the idea. He toured her down the dankest hallways, the darkest, loudest cell blocks. Gilbert Stoga refused to bring dogs in. When Miller approached her again, she was sceptical. But he had made improvements, and was eager to give PBB whatever it needed to work. There were logistical difficulties. “I had to find staffing in the middle of the night,” he says. He needed security guards to watch the yard. “You can’t just let max men just go outside at night. I needed [officers], which I didn’t have.”
Prisons across the US have been reckoning with a staffing shortage. “In my 32 years, I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Miller. Green Haven had to shutter various work and rehabilitation schemes for long periods this year due to lack of staff. Corrections officers in the prison work double shifts and struggle with burnout. It was already a difficult, dangerous, and much maligned job. Research shows corrections officers have higher rates of PTSD than veterans, higher rates of suicide than police.
So when the programme began, an already strained workforce was not happy about what they saw as an initiative to bring in puppies to play with prisoners.
The programme struggled to find its footing with the incarcerated, too. In the first six months, raiser after raiser dropped out or was asked to leave. Some applied to Puppies for the privileges, such as living in “earned housing”, a cell block where prisoners are allowed more time outside their cells. Others struggled to take criticism and feedback from their new teachers. Some were immediately kicked out for failing drug tests. Gilbert Stoga considered shutting the whole thing down.
Courtney Griffin, then the programme’s staff adviser at the prison, begged her to stay. “Green Haven needed this,” says Griffin. “It needed something to really give it life.”
When Griffin brought in a second group of 10 men, the raisers who were still in the programme were taking no chances. “We sat them down and told them, forget the puppies, this is how it is. Get high? Leave. Don’t want to do the work? You’re out,” Milton says.
Gilbert Stoga remains fiercely protective of the programme’s image, wary of anything she believes might affirm negative prejudices about dogs living in prison. Her focus on raising dogs for law enforcement, a post-9/11 pivot from raising dogs for the blind, has made Puppies a popular cause. The programme is a regular feature on the evening news and was featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Later Winfrey came in as a donor.
It’s a feel-good story. The dogs are adorable and the men are dedicated. To see them nurture one another helps absolve our collective shame about the realities of incarceration in America.
The families of the incarcerated men see these news clips about the programme on TV and social media. They’re proud, they point at the screen and say: my son, my brother, my grandad does that. They also ask why these clips don’t have more about the men or women doing the training. They hear how much work goes into it.
It was a big day for Green Haven and the residents of D Block when I returned in January. Four new puppies were arriving. The new raisers waited behind a barred gate, as far out of the core of the prison as they were allowed. Despite the bitter cold, the men had left their uniform jackets in the classroom, wearing their best thick sweaters instead. The PBB photographers, Ashley and Ava, would be taking pictures. Things would look more normal without so much dark green.
The puppies, ink-black, soft-edged labradors, were unable to move in a straight line, enamoured by every new thing. They wandered through gate after gate into the heart of the prison, into the arms of the new raisers. “You’re about to change my life,” James whispered into the ear of his new puppy, Hudson. Tina, the smallest puppy in the group, and Lamel, the tallest man in the programme, couldn’t stop staring at each other.
In the yard, the men noted the exact time of each bowel movement on a sheet of paper. Robert, the kind of raiser who reads the fine print on every dog medication and memorises its side effects, tried to sum up the feeling as he followed little Jedi around the yard. “This is a real happy moment,” he said. In his 20 years in prison on a sentence of 25 to life, he said, this was “the best day by far”.
In the classroom, the older dogs were learning to follow commands even as distracting things were happening around them. Skeets was having trouble, more interested in exploring the room. The rest of the class looked on, tense. Gilbert Stoga was chewing on her lip to avoid interrupting. When Skeets brought his toy back to Milton, she exploded into a full-body celebration.
She handed out 18-month certificates of achievement to the men from the first class of raisers. There were only five of them left.
“Can I please swear?” she asked them. “It’s a big fucking deal.” She handed Milton his certificate. “The dog has been difficult and you haven’t given up,” she said. She turned to the group.
“I don’t know how long you’ve been in here but I know this might be the most proud of yourself that you’ve been in a long time,” she said, fighting to speak through tears. “That means more to me than I can tell you. Puppies isn’t about dogs, it’s about individuals.”
Then, as if flipping a switch, she snapped back into class mode, asking Robert what time Jedi last got busy. “11.36,” he replied instantly, without checking his notes.
The arrival of the new puppies felt like proof that, after a year and a half, the programme was succeeding. “In prison, people always think you’re going to fail, saying ‘These guys ain’t going to make it’,” Milton told me. “We changed the status quo.”
Some of the hardest officers, the ones who used to resent the puppies, now asked to work on D Block. They knew each dog’s name when they passed in the halls.
The new additions had also brought Gilbert Stoga a step closer to her stated goal of turning Green Haven into a hub for the programme. “I would like 100 men and 50 dogs,” she told the men in class. “We’ve gone from five to nine dogs, so we only have 41 more to go.”
Part of this calculation is strategic. The number of men serving life sentences in Green Haven means a stable population of potential dog raisers. Employing raisers who are serving shorter sentences means starting over again and again. “If I’m going to spend three years training you to raise one dog,” she told me, “I want two, three, four dogs.”
There is no doubt that the incarcerated men derive huge value from the programme. They also produce some of the finest working dogs in the country.
Some prison reform advocates question where the boundary lies between a programme and a job, and whether the raisers should be paid for their work. While those incarcerated in New York prisons are paid 7.5 cents to 40 cents an hour for their in-prison jobs, the raisers act as volunteers. Participation in the programme is, after all, voluntary, Gilbert Stoga says.
The US legal system is preoccupied with innocence. A disproportionate amount of media attention is paid to a relatively small number of cases where individuals have been wrongly incarcerated. This is in part because the country has yet to reckon with the much harder question of what it owes to the guilty. Most people in prison have committed a crime and no one gets life in Green Haven for hopping a subway turnstile. But even as rehabilitative programming in prison improves conditions, there’s a deeper moral argument, says John Pfaff, a law professor at New York’s Fordham University. “Even though they’re serving incredibly long sentences, they’re still human, and keeping someone for such a long time in a cage with nothing to do is torture.”
Yet the US legal system is designed for assessing a single moment in time: a crime and its punishment. It is not designed for evaluating, in five years or 50, whether a person has changed. American sentencing, particularly for violent crimes, is also an outlier for its extremity. One in seven prisoners in the US is serving a life sentence, more than in any other wealthy country.
“Change is not a part of the calculus,” says poet, lawyer and formerly incarcerated prison advocate Reginald Dwayne Betts. “We’re not saying that people can’t change. We’re saying that it doesn’t matter . . . a better system of sentencing allows for discretion.” Betts served more than eight years for an armed carjacking at the age of 16. After his release in 2005, he attended Yale Law School, received a Master of Fine Arts and a MacArthur “genius grant”. He began writing after a book of poetry was slipped under his cell door during a stint in solitary confinement. He still doesn’t know by whom.
When I spoke with Betts, he had just got off the phone with a man he had advocated for, who had been jailed for murder and was being denied parole. While he feels the man’s suffering acutely, he says he is also unable to indulge his despair. “He has done everything to prove that he is a different man . . . than he was at 16,” Betts says. “I have to remind him that his dead man is still dead.”
I often left Green Haven wondering about the point of continuing to incarcerate some of the men, clearly changed after so much time. I reminded myself of Superintendent Miller’s early warnings. Maybe I’d been charmed by masters, telling me only what they thought I wanted to hear.
Being in prison skews your convictions, like trying to see something clearly through water. I’ll never know the truth of these men. But I have come to believe that no one is only equal to the worst thing they’ve ever done. No one is as good as the best thing they’ve done, either. This is something dogs never need to be taught.
The men in Green Haven, many first incarcerated as teens or young adults, pay attention to developments such as recent legislation to broaden parole eligibility for offenders who were under 21 when they committed their crime.
Milton, 52, has been incarcerated for more than 30 years, serving consecutive sentences for drug dealing and murder. He will be 93 before he is eligible for parole. He is the only raiser who never talks about his hopes for after he gets out.
Six months before the dogs’ graduation, Gilbert Stoga, her hair piled high, as always, and studded with jewelled clips, asked to speak with Milton and another raiser, Sergio, privately at the start of class. The other men were working on callisthenics that help the puppies build strength and awareness of their bodies. Across the cell block, Milton started to cry behind his glasses. Sergio rubbed his eyes.
Gilbert Stoga called a class meeting to break the news. Sergio’s first puppy, Kai, who had left when it was determined he would be better suited as an explosive-detection dog, had not passed his test with a government agency. He would be adopted as a pet instead. The week before in class, Gilbert Stoga continued, she had noticed Skeets have a negative reaction to the classroom door being left open, “on his home turf”. It became clear to her he wouldn’t make it to graduation. Milton would receive a new dog, Lynn, who had been training in another prison, but had a misshapen toe that disqualified her from EDC work. Gilbert Stoga believed Milton could teach her all the service-dog commands before graduation. “This is Puppies Behind Bars, and puppies come first,” she said. “We don’t put dogs in situations they can’t handle.”
Sergio has served almost 17 years of a 40-year sentence for robbery and attempted murder. Now in his forties, he wears oval wire-rimmed glasses that cross a prison scar tracing from above his left ear all the way down his cheek bone. He has been quick to identify emotional components of the training the men do in the prison. “In this environment, you have to put a mask on,” he told me. But the programme lets him take it off.
“If I’m with Phil doing bonding time on the floor, I’ll talk to him about things, personal things,” he said. “He just listens . . . If I’m having a bad day or something’s bothering me, he picks up on that. And he’s not a robot, just cause he’s a service dog. My job is to pay attention to things he might be going through, too.”
The final time I visited Green Haven, in April, graduation was on everyone’s mind. The men always knew that the dogs only came to Green Haven in order to leave it. Gilbert Stoga had prepared them for this moment since before the puppies arrived. Now they were barrelling towards it.
The men had begun to work as a team, spending all their time together getting the dogs ready to graduate. In private they told me how Kwame worked harder on Penny than he was willing to show, how Malcolm had transformed Casey from a melancholy puppy into a leader. How they heard Jason working quietly with John in his cell at 4.30 each morning, before the rest of the prison awoke. How the dogs had given Milton back a spark that was extinguished. They were proud that the programme was hoping to graduate seven dogs this summer. Then they would do it all again.
The subject for class that afternoon was Pavlovian responses: when a stimulus invokes a reaction in the dog that is really about something else. Gilbert Stoga, her voice already hoarse, was teaching the men about negative responses — not good or bad, but the removal of something.
“How do you get the puppies to learn to not run around the room?” she asked.
“You put their leash on,” Robert answered.
“What does the leash remove from the situation?” Gilbert Stoga asked.
Robert thought about it for a moment, looking down at Jedi, curled at his feet.
“I took his freedom,” Robert said. “So that is going to decrease the behaviour.”
Madison Darbyshire is the FT’s US Investment correspondent
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