Pitchess Pet Project

Maybe fate brought these jailed men and caged animals together for mutual benefit.

Maybe sprucing up haggard dogs and cats will inspire new gentleness among these minor offenders and help turn their lives around. Whatever the case, the pet grooming program at the Pitchess jail, which teaches criminals the arts of claw clipping and flea removal, has survived the budget cuts that threatened to end it.

Instructors say it will continue to offer men with limited futures a marketable skill, while giving a beauty makeover to soiled animals, making them more likely to be adopted from a county animal shelter--the only way for most of them to escape being put to sleep.

“It gives them a chance to get out of the pound,” said inmate Richie Koll, 25, whose self-described vocation for the past seven years was petty crime.

“They’re locked up, like me--but they’re all on death row.”

The program is one of several vocational courses taught at the jail by adult education instructors from the Hacienda La Puente School District.

It was scheduled to end last month to help the district meet its budget. But when members of the Santa Clarita City Council and the office of Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich urged the board to reconsider, the program was preserved.

District officials said the bathing, brushing, barking, hissing and occasional bonding between the animals and their caretakers will continue indefinitely in the small bungalow near the main entrance to the Pitchess compound.

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The grooming shack, where up to eight inmate volunteers work from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. each weekday, is not open to the public. But jail employees can pay $10 for the prisoners to give their pets the works, complete with fragrance and a bow.

The $10 fee is used to meet the expense of grooming dogs and cats taken from the Castaic Animal Shelter. The inmates are not paid but have about five days knocked off their sentences for every 20 days worked. Debbie Pieropan, the program’s instructor, said about half the shelter animals groomed at the shack find a home, a much better rate than that among unkempt pooches and felines that cannot be serviced for lack of time.

In addition, the dogs and cats are sometimes snatched up by jail employees looking for new companions after the animals are transformed by an inmate’s soothing hands. “They’re not guaranteed a home, but they at least leave this place wagging their tails,” Pieropan said while watching Koll towel off a once frightened, now spry shepherd.

“They’ve just had six hours of nothing but attention.”

The program was transplanted from Mira Loma jail in 1994 after that facility closed.

Inmates receive an adult education certificate--with no reference to its having been earned in jail--which can help them get a job in the pet-care or veterinary field after logging 120 hours in the shack. Pieropan said several former students have found work in the pet industry after staying in contact with the school district’s job developer. Salaries for such jobs range from $15,000 to $40,000 a year, she said.

Inmate Thomas Dean said that coping with methamphetamine addiction, six years of homelessness and frequent trouble with the law has led him to consider the field.

“I didn’t know there was such a big demand,” he said, as his heavily tattooed forearms flexed to control a protesting alley cat.

“My life has gone downhill. . . . I’m going to let the job developer know I’m interested.”

The inmates often fret over the fate of their partners behind bars. Koll takes particular pride in a cocker spaniel he restored who eventually found a home.

“When it came here it smelled, man,” he said. “But after I cleaned it up, it looked good enough to be someone’s new pet.”