Jackson Free Press

When Hinds County animal-control officers pick up a dog, they take it to a temporary shelter at the county Penal Farm in Raymond. The county shelter houses between 700 and 1,000 dogs a year. After a week, most make their way to the Mississippi Animal Rescue League where, more often than not, they are euthanized. A lucky few earn a spot in the county's special program.

Since 2001, the Second Chance Pet Partners program has used county inmates to train rescued dogs in basic obedience and more advanced service skills, like opening doors and flipping light switches. Working with 10 to 12 dogs at a time, inmates rehabilitate the dogs, many of which have been abused, neglected or abandoned.

Maj. Teresa Gardner, who oversees the program and the county's animal-control unit, says that the rehabilitation process is a slow one.

"It takes anywhere from 12 weeks to sometimes six months to get a dog to where they'll trust another human being again, because someone's been so hateful to them," Gardner tells me when I visit the program on a muggy morning two weeks ago.

The program is housed in a low, cinder-block building on the Hinds County Penal Farm. A large grassy field surrounded by a chain-link fence provides the dogs with open space to play. When Gardner opens the door to the dogs' "runs," their kennels, they erupt in barking, but her two assistants, Tim Tisdale and Johnnie Sublette, quiet them promptly with a few soft commands.

Gardner points to two mutts, brothers that the program adopted eight months ago from a no-kill shelter in Madison County. One of them, Kaiser, intermittently paces a small circle in his kennel.

"These two dogs were in the kennel for nine months before I got my hands on them and brought them down here," Gardner said, dismay audible in her voice. "They literally lived in the kennel. That's why you see he turns the way he does. That's called kennel fever, all he did for months."

The kennels at the Second Chance facility all have doors to provide the dogs access to the outside. Gardner asks Tisdale and Sublette to bring out two dogs to demonstrate their training regimen.

Tisdale walks around the room with Wilson, an energetic, longhaired Briard, trotting alongside. The county acquired Wilson after a friend of Gardner's found him at a gas station in Hattiesburg.

"A car pulled up and threw that dog out the door," Gardner says.

Tisdale has been training Wilson for almost two months, and the work has paid off. A family from Booneville, Mo., has adopted him after finding him on petfinder.com.

Sentenced to 13 years for grand larceny, forgery and embezzlement, Tisdale, 30, has a little more time on the farm. He is due for release in 2014.

Sublette has an easy rapport with Max, a German shepherd of about two and a half years. When Gardner accepted him from a New Orleans rescue service, he was barely alive.

"He was so undernourished, he was nothing but skin hanging on bone," Gardner says. "It caused his back to arch, because his bones were so deteriorated."

Second Chance raised more than $400 to treat Max for heartworms. Aside from the slight arch in his back that will probably never go away, he looks healthy now.

Sublette, 42, is near the end of his four-year sentence for DUI, which ends in December. "When I go home, he's coming with me," he says with a smile.