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BY PAUL COLLINS - - - - Paul Collins’s recent book Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism combines a memoir about his son Morgan with a travelogue into the past and present of autism and neurology. This excerpt visits a prison near Green Bay, Wisconsin. Paul’s update on the fate of this program will appear tomorrow. The Sanger Correctional Facility is a squat one-story structure of brown brick; add some monkey bars outside and paint some hopscotch squares, and you’d think it was an elementary school from the 1970s. And it is my old elementary school inside: the linoleum, the painted cinderblock, the smell of cleanser. There’s even a superintendent’s office—no one answers to the title of warden here—and above it all, the buzz of institutional fluorescent lighting. Ribs are being served in the cafeteria; prisoners line up with their trays, and we walk the entire gauntlet. I’m the only visitor here, and every single prisoner in line stares blankly at me: I look down. Sgt. McGovern doesn’t notice—he’s used to it. Inmates sitting at tables pause from their lunches to greet the golden retriever with us. “Billy, hey! Billy-billy-billy!” “Guys,” McGovern nods to them. When we get out to the prison yard out back, a few inmates are languidly bouncing a basketball back and forth, enjoying the first good weather in days. “Hey,” McGovern greets them, and shields his eyes against the sun. “Planning your escape?” “Naw.” They laugh bashfully, and tousle the dog. “Man’s fooling with us. Fooling.” And McGovern is at ease around them. He’s here off the clock today; two guards are already at their post in the hub of the wheel-spoke prison, a Plexiglassed office that looks down the two cellblock wings and out into the cafeteria. Sgt. McGovern pauses to scratch Billy’s head as we walk away, and he quietly nods over at the guard station. “That’s what I did for years before getting this dog program. Just sitting there, all day, like a scarecrow.” I watch them: they watch me back. The clock inside their station crawls slowly. Sgt. McGovern is on his third decade of forty-plus-hour weeks as a corrections officer. It occurs to me that he has now spent more time in this prison than most of his inmates.
We crunch over the gravel parking lot in front of the path that winds down from the prison. There are no guard towers, not even any fences. Out by the road, though, is a much older house—a farmhouse, by the look of it. Wedged as it is between the prison building and County Line Road, it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to live there, never mind any realtor being able to sell it. And yet I see hanging out of one of its windows a guy repainting an old window frame while Foghat hammers away from a little transistor radio. “That’s Independence House,” Sgt. McGovern follows my gaze. “Seven inmates living there. It’s a privilege earned for good behavior.” My eyebrows go up: It’s a house. They could just walk away, saunter down the road. “They don’t try leaving,” he interrupts my thought. “Here’s the thing. The guys we put in there are lifers, guys on 20-year terms.” My confusion is obvious to him now. “You’re thinking they’d run, right? No. Lifers know—they get caught, they go to max. They’re motivated by that. Lifers are the reliable ones.” He gestures around. “There’s no fences here. This prison was built 20 years ago for 60 prisoners. It’s got 120 now. Know how many guards? Twelve, total. Two in there at any one time. Two guards, 120 prisoners. And we don’t have problems, really. Not many incidents. If they screw up here ... if they can’t even handle this, they can wind up in max. And they don’t want that. So they stay.” The only fences they need here are for the dogs. “I guess it’s a prison of the mind,” he muses.
“LIBERTY DOG PROGRAM,” the mural announces from the side of the cinderblock building. The Liberty Dog Program started years ago, and it has nearly died every one of those years. Politicians don’t like it much, because nobody likes prisoners very much—not even prisoners who train dogs for the disabled. Everybody loves to be Tough On Crime; it’s much tougher to know what to do with your criminals. No one wins votes for thinking hard about that. And yet the idea seems like a wonderfully obvious one. We need prisons; we need guide dogs. It takes time and an exercise yard to train guide dogs, and prisoners have nothing but time and an exercise yard. “We’ve got 12 dogs out back. And inside here we’re putting in a little living room, just like home,” Sgt. McGovern says as he takes me indoors. He gestures at an empty expanse of concrete floor. “It’ll have a rug, chairs, sofa, lamps—just all the stuff you’d have in a living room. That way both the dogs and disabled people we’re matching them with can train in a realistic setting.” Billy trots around on the concrete as if to emphasize the point. “Watch this,” McGovern says. “Billy? Billy! Get me a beer.” Billy bounds to an old refrigerator pushed over into a corner. The fridge has a thick nautical rope tied around its handle, and Billy takes the rope in his mouth and yanks the door open. Then he reaches in, tilts his jaws around a beer can, and delivers it into McGovern’s hands. “Check out the brand,” the sergeant says, and I look at the practice can. It’s gone through a lot, and has plenty of scratches and dents from canine teeth, but I can clearly make out its ancient label: Billy Beer. “What do you train for with autism?” “Danger. Spotting danger. That’s the first thing. Autistic kids might try running into a pool of water, or into the street—you know, they see something and they’re interested in it, they focus on it, and they don’t notice anything else. The parents worry about that. So basically the dogs help shepherd them. And also, the dog’s a connection to other people. It’s their interpreter.” If autistics are the ultimate introverts, dogs are the ultimate extroverts. They are all about pack behavior, about being social: they are constantly noticing the world around them. Dogs don’t read, they don’t reprogram your computer. But they’re very good at seeing when someone is trying to be friendly to you, or when someone is threatening you: exactly the things an autist misses. The two, it seems, are made for each other. - - - - TOMORROW: Laura Dern! Nuns! Security breaches!Paul Collins’s most recent book is Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism. He is also series editor of the Collins Library. English As She Is Spoke, the first title issued through the Collins Library, is now available in paperback.
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