Pawsitive experience: Program gives inmates, dogs a second chance at life

When Taylor D’Arienzo landed in the Suffolk County jail in Yaphank more than a year ago, it was a low point for the 31-year-old Lake Grove resident.

But last fall, some new arrivals gave her hope: puppies.

The canines and their weekly visit are part of a new program at the jail designed to give inmates more confidence in themselves as they help train them, and provide the inmates with a little bit of puppy love to boost their spirits.

“It’s like a visit, like an unconditional love kind of visit,“ D’Arienzo said Monday at a graduation ceremony. “These animals will love you regardless of your charge or what you did wrong — it’s a great feeling.”

The program is the brainchild of Deborah Whitney, a professional dog trainer who donates her time, skills, and puppies to both the Yaphank facility and the county jail in Riverhead.

Puppies in tow, she comes to the Yaphank facility once a week for two hours, and twice a week to the Riverhead facility.

There, inmates help train the dogs in basic obedience, to sit, lay down, come here.

The animals are from high-kill shelters in the south of the country, she said.

That’s why the program is dubbed “Pawsitive Second Chance.”

”It is a program that offers unconditional love for the animals as well as for each inmate who handles the animals, and hopefully gives them a second chance on life as it does to all of these animals that we have rescued,” she said.

Eventually the animals are put up for adoption through the Port Jefferson-based Save A Pet shelter.

So far more than 50 puppies and about two dozen inmates have gone through the program, which has consisted of two six-week sessions.

”We are really enthusiastic and very happy that we are able to have this” program, Suffolk County Sheriff Errol D. Toulon Jr. said at the ceremony. 

The inmates “have to be responsible, they have to take care of a pet, their socialization, which will really help them as they re-integrate ... back into our communities,“ he said. 

Some of the inmates, once released, have gone on to get jobs at dog shelters or volunteer at one, Whitney said.

D’Arienzo said the program helps take her mind off the pain of being separated from her 15-month-old son — and gives her skills she thinks she can use once she gets out.

“It’s kind of like training a kid, or raising a kid in a sense, where you have to have a lot of patience with them,” she said. “The dog will kind of teach you things within yourself. “

Another inmate, Jennifer Romero, 29, of Copiague, said she was reluctant to get involved in the program because she never had a pet as a child.

”I was nervous, slowly but surely I started loving the puppy," she said.

Now she likes the dogs so much she is thinking of adopting one herself once she gets out of jail.

“My father always asks me, ‘Why are you always in such good spirits if you are in jail?’ ” she said. Programs at the jail including Pawsitive “give hope,” she said.

Whitney said she has a special motivation for running the program: she was once in jail herself.

It was a low point in her life, as she got caught up in an embezzlement scheme. But what got her through was a program at the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, where she was confined that trained explosives-detecting canines.

Now, she said, the program she is running on Long Island “has a special place in my heart.“