A Dog's Gift by Bob Drury

Author:Bob Drury
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rodale
Published: 2015-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

The half-dozen new entry-level trainers had never before met Terry Henry, but his hard-ass reputation preceded him. They had been working in the paws4prisons program on a kind of probationary basis, and they were aware that this was probably their only chance to convince him that they were worthy to remain full time. To that end, what followed resembled not so much job interviews as much as pieces of performance art.

Like some kind of courtroom scene, Terry Henry, Terri Martin, and I settled in behind a long table facing a lone chair in the middle of the room. The prison official, pen poised, withdrew a legal pad from her briefcase. Terry Henry took no notes as the lead trainer escorted the inmates in one at a time. As at Lakin, the women were all ages, shapes, and sizes; black, brown, and white.

With each inmate, Terry Henry began with the same statement: “Tell me about yourself and why you want to work with my dogs.”

One short, beefy woman, serving seventy-eight months for credit card fraud, said the paws4prisons program had provided her with “a sense of accomplishment, pride, and self-esteem” that she’d never felt on the outside. Another, whose face resembled a welder’s mask and who had been convicted of selling crystal meth, promised that when she got out, she would devote the rest of her life to working with rescue dogs.

The women were all nervous, but they displayed those nerves in different manners. Some approached the chair as if there might be snakes under it, and a few punctuated their answers with girly-girl giggles. One inmate in particular either would not, or could not, stop talking. She was a brassy, plump blonde, somewhere in her early thirties, and she spoke with a pronounced drawl. She told us she had been arrested and convicted in Virginia a year earlier for drug conspiracy after her boyfriend died in a car accident and she’d taken over his marijuana, meth, and cocaine “dealership.” She said the word as if she had sold used Hondas.

“I know it was wrong, but I didn’t know what else to do,” she said. “I’d never really worked a real job in my life, and the money was good, and it seemed so easy, and the lifestyle was fun, and I rarely used my own product . . . ”

On and on she rambled, giving us a detailed, inside look at the world of buying drugs wholesale from Mexican middlemen, how to cut them and where to store them (behind false garage walls), where the best retail opportunities arose (malls and college campuses), and how to recruit a student sales force (free samples). After fifteen minutes she was still regaling us with the inside dope, as it were, on the middle-class drug trade, and Terri Martin was increasingly side-eyeing Terry Henry, wondering how much more of this narrative he would sit through. After a few more minutes, he finally raised his hand to signal “enough.” I had to stifle a

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