Prison Road Puppies©

PawPADs is teamed with the Federal Correctional Facility in Sandstone, MN (FCI Sandstone) to work with prison inmates in raising and training Assistance Dogs for placement with persons having physical disabilities.

The dogs are also taken on week-end "puppy passes" by FCI Sandstone Correctional staff and Volunteers. The week-end visits provide exposure to family living, children, shopping and restaurant situations; the usual life outside prison walls.

PawPADs receives no tax dollars or other Government funding for the program and currently must cover 100% of all costs associated with raising and training the dogs in the prison, including veterinary services, educational supplies for the puppy raisers/trainers, instructors' costs, and travel. You can get involved with this incredible program simply by making a tax deductible gift right here!

Inmate participants in the program have the drive and desire to pay something back to society and their communities; to give rather than take. As the inmates learn to train and care for service dogs, they have the opportunity to develop skills such as emotional and social competence, leadership skills, increased levels of responsibility, empathy, and emotional regulation. Over the approximately 18 - 24 months the puppies are in FCI Sandstone they will be taught up to 90 commands to perform such tasks as:

The facility staff and Correctional Officers often speak of the fact that these inmate participants are highly motivated to maintain good behavior and take great pride in the skills they learn and the high quality assistance dogs they send out to be the life partners with a person with a disability. "It's impossible to tell you the impact these dogs have here," - FCI Sandstone Supervisors.

Driving down a dusty dead-end road - aptly named "Prison Road," - on a hot July day, just outside the village of Sandstone, in east central Minnesota, you eventually come to a clearing in the thick woods.

There, in the quiet heat, amid the buzz of mosquitos and crickets, stands the Federal Correctional Facility (FCI) Sandstone, a low security facility for male offenders, with it's high stone walls, barbed wire topped fences, towers and harsh lights.

As long and hopeless as the trip down the Prison Road seems, Prison Road is a two way street: The men and dogs who make the long trip down the road eventually will make the trip back outside the walls, up the road, and back into society.

It is a road of hope both for the men in the program and the persons with disabilities with whom the dogs will be placed with.