BY DAVE CHOATE
Even kittens are doing time these days.
A visitor to the New Hampshire State Prison for Women in Goffstown might be surprised to see the cats padding around the rooms, but Robin Ahlgren said having inmates care for the semi-feral cats is a great move for those kittens who need to adjust to humans so they will be ready for adoption into a good home.
“You really have to flood feral kittens with socialization. This ended up being a great idea because the inmates are there for the cats all the time,” said Ahlgren, the director of development and community outreach at the Animal Rescue League in Bedford.
The program is run jointly by the women’s prison via education director Carole Whitcher and Animal Rescue League shelter manager Dave Betournay. After the two groups hatched the idea in order to socialize the cats, the prison ran an eight-week pilot program and found it successful.
Fast forward roughly two years and inmate Melissa Cordle is currently taking care of two of the seven kittens currently residing in the prison. Feral when they came in, little Oscar and Felix have been tamed over the course of the last week and probably only need one more.
“They were hissing and spitting when they first got here,” Cordle said. “But they’re spoiled rotten by the time they leave here.”
Cordle was one of the first inmates approached for the program by Whitcher in June 2005. Unless the kittens don’t adapt quickly and need to be rotated among inmates, they are kept in their caretaker’s room, with the inmates feeding them and cleaning their litter boxes.
New Hampshire Department of Corrections public information officer Jeff Lyons said all the food and supplies are provided by the Animal Rescue League and impose no extra cost on taxpayers. He said the required nurturing and watchfulness it takes to take care of kittens prove valuable to inmates.
“Carole Whitcher really looks at it as an educational program, and it gives (inmates) a skill and a good feeling. There can’t be a lot of prison programs with cats out there, so the cat program was really an initiative on our part,” Lyons said.
Inmates were screened to determine if they could handle the responsibility and time it takes to socialize a cat, and then all of them had to undergo an intensive veterinary science course. Betournay wrote that his program has seen 94 percent of the kittens rehabilitated and returned to the shelter ready to be adopted.
“(Inmates) note the similarity between themselves and the feral kittens and can uniquely related to living on the fringe of society, all too often forgotten or unseen, but ready for a second chance and a new life. Remarkably, each resident and kitten in many ways gives life and a second chance to the other,” Betournay wrote.
Ahlgren said she agrees that the nurturing nature of the inmates is brought out by the tiny kittens. The process makes getting kittens to good homes much easier, a good thing for an animal facility that she said is currently almost 100 cats over its usual capacity.
Cordle said the rambunctious kittens keep her busy, but that’s been a good thing for her.
“They really raise Cain all the time, but they’re cute,” Cordle said, watching the two kittens play under her bunk bed. “It’s really been a wonderful project."