A Second Chance - Inmates Training Horses in Ocala, FL
Inmates help rehabilitate retired racehorses and end up learning valuable lessons of their own.
February 2, 2007
By Dave Joseph Staff Writer
OCALA — She's standing in front of this corner stall, in the cool breezeway of this wooden barn, when the retired thoroughbred Skip to the Wire begins poking and nuzzling his head into her shoulders and back.
Amy Morehead allows a smile to crease her face. Slowly, she moves her right arm away from her side and allows the 4-year-old to push his head through. Within seconds, he's being cradled in Morehead's arms.
"When you look outside this barn," she says, "you see fields and horses and you just feel like you're supposed to be here."
She says this wearing prison blues. She says this in sight of guard towers and concertina wire. Morehead, a 25-year-old recovering methamphetamine user, says this seven months after being put behind bars here at the Lowell Correctional Facility.
She isn't the only one.
Amanda Gerak, who has been incarcerated for four years for DUI manslaughter, says this place has allowed her "inner peace and a major healing process."
Chastity Anderson, a recovering heroin addict, says before arriving at this barn she was "wandering around aimlessly without a purpose."
"And now it's become my haven," she says.
Anderson, Gerak and Morehead are part of the first program of its kind in the United States, allowing female inmates to rehabilitate in part by working with retired thoroughbreds provided by the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation. Under the direction of John Evans, a former thoroughbred trainer and steward, 15 women care for about 50 retired thoroughbreds on this land between the Lowell Correctional Facility for women and the Marion Correctional Facility for men.
"I'm crying thinking about how lucky we are," said inmate Lynne Austin, who holds a masters degree in nursing and is serving a six-year sentence for first-degree grand theft.
The TRF, a non-profit organization based in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., feeds 1,225 retired horses a day, according to executive director Diana Pikulski. Another 600 have been adopted out to private homes.
"And that's the goal here," Evans said. "While some of these horses are never going to be adopted out due to their injuries or age, the idea is to get them to a point after they've been here a while where they can become a nice riding or trail horse for someone."
And it's the inmates' job to help retrain these horses while also rehabilitating themselves. Not only do they muck stalls and groom and bathe the horses, but after passing a curriculum by Evans, the women administer medication and are rewarded for good behavior by riding the horses. It's the same curriculum being taught at correctional facilities in New York, Kentucky, South Carolina and Iowa that have partnered with the TRF.
"It provides a need for the horses who need reintroduction into the general population," said Michael Porter, a clinical assistant professor with the University of Florida Mobile Equine Diagnostic Service. "But it also serves an important role to inmates in giving them some purpose. These inmates handle these horses very well. You can tell the horses respond to them. So I think, not to sound like an old cliche, it's a win-win situation for the inmates and the horses."
While most of the horses arrive at the facility with "injuries related to training," according to Porter, the women come from all social and educational backgrounds. They believe the program offers them a chance to build confidence and trust.
"Trust is a big thing here," Austin said. "I believe most women who are incarcerated come into the system because they've had trust issues in relationships. They've been verbally, physically, emotionally or sexually abused. They're self-medicated and feel they don't belong. And it's hard in prison to learn to trust because all you hear is that nobody cares about you. It's a cold, uncaring environment.
"But you learn to trust yourself and trust others here. If I'm holding a horse and she's acting up and someone else is trying to treat that horse medically, that woman has to trust me to hold that horse and not allow that horse to hurt her. I think that's the thing I've learned from this prison experience is to love myself again and trust myself again. And to be trusted with an animal is a big part of that."
Morehead, who has a 9-year-old daughter, showed horses when she was growing up in Tampa. "But I got detoured," she said. "This is a hell of a way to come back to them.
"But this has been a saving grace for me," she said. "Most of us have children that we miss. So this is like babying your baby. You have someone to get close to and that makes it a lot better for you in here."
Anderson says the women feel an empathy with the horses because, like the women caring for them, some of the horses were unwanted.
"They lived a fast-pace life on the track, and for my two years of [heroin] addiction I lived that life, too," she says. "I was in a different place all the time with new people around me all the time. I'm sure I suffered physical and mental abuse but I didn't care. So now we're here and they're retired. We're giving them love and they're giving us love.
"It's like we're both starting over."
Dave Joseph can be reached at djoseph@sun-sentinel.com.
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2007-02-02/news/0702011082_1_horses