CGC In Prison

I was recently asked to visit the Curran-Fromhold facil­ity which is part of the Philadel­phia Prison Sys­tem. My good friend, Nicole Larocco (the for­mer head of behav­ior and train­ing for the PSPCA), is part of a new pro­gram in the prison that was ini­ti­ated by Mar­ian March­ese. Inmates with no pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence with dog train­ing are selected to train res­cue dogs from ACCT, a Philadel­phia ani­mal shel­ter. Dur­ing the ten week pro­gram, the new han­dlers were instructed in pos­i­tive rein­force­ment train­ing tech­niques. The final require­ment is hav­ing their dogs pass the AKC Canine Good Cit­i­zen (CGC) test. Grad­u­at­ing from this pro­gram is a con­sid­er­a­tion for parole. I recently became an AKC CGC eval­u­a­tor and that is the rea­son for my visit to the prison yesterday.

I was really impressed by both the dogs and the han­dlers. We had two Pit Bulls, one Black Lab and one mixed breed. The dogs were very respon­sive and extremely well behaved. The young men were patient with their dogs and extremely com­pe­tent han­dlers. I was impressed all the way around. Nicole did a great job instruct­ing them. Need­less to say, every­body passed with fly­ing colors.

The han­dlers have learned a new skill and are very proud of their abil­i­ties. After the test, sev­eral of the guys asked me about becom­ing cer­ti­fied dog train­ers. I wish them well in the future.