Knock LA

Ryan Fukuda said he would spend weeks on end independently training the dogs at the South LA shelter before they reached the prison program so that they were used to some handling. He said that this was also necessary to differentiate between which dogs would be good candidates and which wouldn’t because if they could not be handled, if they were too mentally unfit, they could not go on to the Lancaster State Prison to be trained. 

Early sentiments from the officers about not wanting the program dissipated over time, said Donovan. Officers who previously wouldn’t converse with him at all began asking him advice about their own dogs and asking about how the dog training was going. He noticed their relationship and attitude with him changing. Other inmates who weren’t in the program would also come up to Donovan asking to pet the dog he was out in the yard training. It lightened up the facility’s atmosphere altogether and sparked conversations that would have not happened otherwise. 

A-yard programming helped break down politics inside the prison and created unity within — not only between inmates, but staff as well. 

“I believe it broke some of the stereotypes inside because we were able to work together as one group,” said Donovan.

The program was such a success that it was common for government officials to come in for a tour. They wanted to know how the program worked and how it was so successful, he said. 

Donovan presented to the parole board in 2019 and got a three-year denial because they told him he was not ready yet. On June 11, 2021, he was granted his release, at which time he said he was overwhelmed with emotions. 

“Very scary, very overwhelming, but also I was filled with joy and peace,” he said. “It was also scary because nothing on the outside looked the same compared to when I first went in.” 

Today, Donovan considers himself blessed to have participated in the dog program and to have been given a second chance at life, which he intends to enjoy. He recently got married, works as a solar power technician, and has his own dog training business.

Evolved Thinking and Teaching

Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy is an English professor at California State University, Los Angeles. When he first made contact with Karma Rescue, he was eager to find a dog to adopt. Through Karma, he adopted two loving pit bulls and began volunteering for the rescue. One of his adoptees — Romeo, a beloved 80-pound pit bull — lived to be eighteen years old. 

The outcome of Dr. Roy’s experience with Karma Rescue transcended what he imagined. While he was volunteering for the prison program, Rande Levine asked him to help out with writing assignments since he taught writing at Cal State LA. Dr. Roy slowly started taking the classwork he was teaching and implementing it into the inmates’ assignments. They enjoyed it and requested that he start a bachelor’s program so they could get more than an associate’s degree. 

“The residents at Lancaster would say ‘We want to have a bachelor’s degree,’” he said. “So at that point I started talking to my university, asking ‘Can we think about doing this’ and then eventually we were able to start a BA degree that really came directly from that Karma Rescue Paws for Life experience.”

He said he noticed that while dogs at risk for euthanasia certainly needed a hope and future, he felt a pull on his conscience about the inmates as well. As he became more familiar with their work and spent time with them in the prison, he thought they deserved more. He said that at the beginning, when he first started going to Lancaster prison, the landscape was very different and people from outside weren’t allowed to enter the prisons — it was very closed off and cold. Volunteering with Karma Rescue granted him that access. 

“As much as I love dogs and pit bulls and was supporting that, there were obvious parallels with the human beings that kind of shared a similar background and I looked at it like, well we can’t just care about the dogs here and leave these human beings behind. So that changed my life really, and it became my full-time job shortly after that,” Dr. Roy said.

He is now the director of Cal State LA’s Prison Graduation Initiative, the first in-person bachelor’s degree completion program for incarcerated students in California. It has now expanded to other prisons, and Dr. Roy said he was granted a contract to integrate into San Quentin.

Looking back on his most memorable times with the program, he said he will never forget witnessing a man who had been in jail for 45 years interact with a dog for the first time. The man’s response was overwhelming. His body looked as if it were convulsing, and he began crying frantically. Dr. Roy said when someone touches you in prison, it is usually violent. To witness the effects of a dog’s love on another man moved him. 

“I don’t know how much you know about prisons, but you’re not allowed to touch people. There’s no physical contact with the outside world,” he said. “So someone that’s been incarcerated a long time, the only way for another being to touch them is usually violent.”

Dr. Roy said he feels that the culture and politics within prisons have not always been geared towards rehabilitation, but rather operate as a breeding ground for violence and unhealthy relationships between those working in the prisons and the incarcerated residents. However, he is starting to see that California prisons are going through a slow transformation of adopting methods that mirror the Norwegian prison model, which fosters a rehabilitation versus punishment approach. In 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom officially announced plans to turn San Quentin State Prison into a rehabilitation center.  

“The fact that we now have a bachelor’s program in the prison was unfathomable when I first went in with Rande. Specially for it to be implemented into a max security prison is really a big deal, and it’s spread to other prisons,” Dr. Roy said. “That’s why the first time with Karma Rescue was important because had something not come out of that, and had the relationships with CDCR (California State Prison, Los Angeles County) not been built, you know, who knows? Maybe we wouldn’t have had a BA program there, probably not.”

Embracing Fear to Give Up Violence

Michael Todd’s life as a youth wasn’t at all how it is today as an activist, educator, and service dog trainer to upper-class Los Angeles. Todd said that because of childhood trauma, he turned to the streets for love and participated in a gang. When he was fifteen years old, he went to jail for murder. Tried as an adult, he was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison and when he turned seventeen, he was placed in a maximum security prison. 

His gang affiliation continued while in prison, Todd said, because prison politics make it hard to escape it.

 “You can’t really get away from gang politics, because gang politics in prison are race politics,” Todd said. “The Bloods and the Crips hate each other, but if the whites and the Blacks go to war, all the whites and Blacks go to war; every race just sticks together.”

Todd first applied for parole in 2017 but because he was still still participating in prison brawls and affiliations, the board gave him a five-year parole denial, which meant he couldn’t apply for parole until another five years passed. 

His love for animals started as a child because his family often had all kinds of animal companions, from parakeets to dogs. In prison, he said he continued to foster his love for animals by nurturing whatever animal he could find.

 “While I was there you always find a little pet that you can keep with you, whether it’s a spider or people would get you a mouse. I had a jackrabbit in my cell at one point; other people got gophers,” Todd said.

He said one time he was placed on a job to do yard work. He would knock down bird nests and would take in all the baby birds and rehabilitate them on his cell block. He successfully rehabilitated many sparrows and kept them in his cell or allowed other inmates to adopt them. 

“My building was full of people who had birds in their cell,” Todd said. At one point he even built a birdhouse out of cardboard for his cell. He said each bird has its own personality. He cheerfully remembered the personality of one of his sparrows: “So my bird would come up every morning at about 5:36. You’d hear her in there moving around. She’d come out, she’d start sharpening her beak on the cardboard, and then she would fly over, land on my pillow and pick at my neck until I lifted the covers, and then she’d go on to my chest.”

He remembers having a special relationship with the birds he raised. One time in particular, he was placed in the “SHU,” also known as the special housing unit, a form of disciplinary segregation. One of his birds flew under the door to be with him. 

 “I had a bird that got out into the day room and flew around for about three days. Then it crawled back under my door and came back to me,” Todd said.

After getting his first parole rejection, Todd said he was eager to remain on the right path. He heard about the dog program and requested to join. Many were on the waitlist for about three years. He said that they were trying to racially balance the program and they needed someone who was white, so he got lucky and was granted admission after just two months. He continued to participate in the program from December 2017 until August 2022, when he was granted his parole. 

When he appeared before the parole board again, he said the dogs are what made all the difference in him, which the board recognized. 

Despite society’s notions about pit bulls being incapable of non-aggressive behavior, he experienced them as being teachable and intelligent.

“It’s about their history, what they’ve been through and how their owners had treated them in the past,” he said. “Life experiences matter. It’s not just the breed.”

With his previous history of being in a gang, it is important for Todd to be cognizant of the areas that he goes to in LA. According to him, if he goes back to prison, he goes back to die. Todd said that when he chose to give up violence, he had to learn to be comfortable with fear because violence was too risky. He knew that if he wanted to stay out of prison, he couldn’t use violence to protect himself anymore.

In prison, Todd said he became more self-aware about his actions and all factors that contributed to them. His childhood trauma had deeply wounded him, but he said getting mental health services in prison was risky because if others found out about it, it could lead them to mistrust you and make you a target of violence. “If you went and talked to the psych unit, somebody on the yard would stab you,” Todd said. “You don’t ask for help because now others don’t know if they can trust you, they don’t know what you’re telling them, or if you’re mentally insane.”

Now that he is out of prison, his primary job is working for the Compassion Prison Project, where he is passionate about educating others on the links between childhood trauma and criminality. He regularly goes to prisons and teaches inmates techniques on how to help regulate their nervous system. He also works for a non-profit called Mass Liberation, which handles transitional housing for people getting out of prison. Todd said he also runs his own dog training program and has goals of teaching youth how to train dogs so that they can build confidence and self esteem and don’t feel the need to turn to a life of crime, gangs, and drugs. 

Thinking back, Todd said transitioning out of prison is difficult mentally, physically, and financially. However, being a dog trainer gave him a sense of personability that made integrating back into society much smoother. In prison he learned several advanced skills, but when he left and was living in transition housing, he was told he could only apply for minimum wage jobs. The same skill that helped Todd rebuild his confidence behind prison walls also reshaped his future. His reputation as a dog trainer reached the president of the company that owned the transitional home where he was living, who asked Todd to train his dog. The opportunity became a turning point. Today, Todd earns his living as a trusted dog trainer while dedicating himself to mentoring incarcerated men and advocating for young people.

“Working with dogs saved my life,” Todd said. “It gave me an understanding of empathy, of unconditional love and caring for something.”