Animal Care May Help Inmates Clean Up Their Acts

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 to turn their lives around.

Whatever the case, the pet grooming program at the Pitchess jail in Castaic, which teaches criminals the arts of claw-clipping and flea removal, has survived the budget cuts that threatened to end it.

Instructors say the program offers 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 death.

“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.

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

The grooming shack, where up to eight inmate volunteers 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 a bath, complete with fragrance and a bow. Sometimes dogs and cats transformed by an inmate’s soothing hands are snatched up by jail employees looking for new companions.

The $10 fee meets the expense of grooming dogs and cats taken from the Castaic animal shelter. Inmates are not paid, but get 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 for unkempt pooches and felines that cannot be groomed because of lack of time.

“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 perky shepherd.

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

After logging 120 hours in the shack, an inmate receives an adult education certificate--with no reference to its having been earned in jail--which can help them to get a job in the pet-care or veterinary field. 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 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.”