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Florida Inmates Now Sentenced To Dog Walking While Penned

Sarah Hofmann Contributor
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Some Florida inmates won’t need to worry about being on litter pick-up duty or hard labor; they have a new, fluffy task to attend to while locked up.

Sheriff Wayne Ivey of Brevard County, Fla. is proposing using inmates to help walk shelter dogs. Ivey explained to WFTV, “When we first started looking at the merger with Animal Services we looked at supplanting some of the work force with inmate labor, not only in helping repair the facilities and clean up the kennels and things like that, [but] we knew we could use them to walk the dogs.”

Brevard county has a shortage of volunteers to walk the dogs and are confident that training non-violent offenders is the answer, especially since they’ve successfully gone down a similar road before. Ivey said, “There are liabilities with anything you do with inmates [but] we have a similar program, Paws and Stripes, that we’ve been running for four years, where we pair a rescue dog with a female inmate and they kind of go through the troubled times together.”

The proposal would save taxpayer money and benefit the dogs. As long as there are enough precautions, it seems like a win, both for the county and the dogs.

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Sarah Hofmann