(Atlanta, GA) - Susan Jacobs-Meadows is the founder of Canine Cellmates, a program designed to help rehabilitate incarcerated men using shelter dogs.
Rather hear the conversation about Canine Cellmates?
Susan's heart to start Canine Cellmates?
"I had some personal connections to some of the things that lead people to incarceration…and some personal connections with incarceration within my immediate family.”
Susan said she came to know a little about Fulton County Jail (noted for being overcrowded, unsanitary and unsafe) and wanted to do something, although she wasn’t sure what that something was.
Speaking with a staff member at Fulton County Jail, she suddenly mentioned “I was thinking about starting a jail dog program at Fulton County jail.” Susan surprised herself with the thought.
By January of 2012, Canine Cellmates became a reality.
“Our in-custody program…we pull dogs out of Fulton County animal services, which is a large, open intake shelter here in Atlanta; we move them into the jail where they live 24 hours a day with inmate handlers. Their job is to live with them, socialize with them, care for them, bond with them, and train them.”
“The heart of our program is the dogs; the focus of our program is the men. We are a rehabilitative program so there’s a lot of other components to the programming…classes, motivational speakers to introduce them to as many people as we can, and we help them after their release.”
The impact?
Susan says the result vary.
"On some of them, a purely '180' kind of impact. Not on everyone. Not everybody’s ready. We get that. We would love to say that every single person’s life has been dramatically changed, but we don’t get to control that.
Every dog’s life is changed very dramatically because they come out of shelters, gone through our program and been adopted.
We believe that this program plants seeds, we just may not be around to see it."