Lift Me Up

Lift Me Up

People come in, they get to touch a horse, maybe the first time in their entire lives they've actually seen a live horse up close and personal. And they have the opportunity to not only see them, but to, if I'm with you, then I don't mind taking you in there and actually brushing them and kind of just being around them. And their entire demeanor changes when you're around them. They like to be around people and people just calm down and relax. It's amazing, it really is.

Bringing calm

Stacie
Correctional Officer

My name is Stacie and I work at Edmonton Maximum Security Institution.

I bring horses on site for staff and officers to come in and have a little bit of a mental wellness break.

I was sitting in the gate one night shift or evening shift, and I had in the course of a four-hour shift, three officers coming in at various points. They didn't come in together, but they came in and they just needed somewhere to vent and to just talk to somebody and people don't mind talking to me. And over that course of that time, I realized that we just weren't doing well here. We needed something to help people decompress, relax, and just generally have something that was good and positive in this place. And I thought, you know what, perfect thing to bring to people. I had some conversation with my AWO (Assistant Warden, Operations), he was fantastically supportive in all of this. And he actually said, you know what, if you want to bring these guys in on a regular basis, then that is perfect.

Max comes in quite often. He's my main saddle horse and he goes everywhere with me. We have ridden everywhere. And this is actually his full sister Molly and they are 21 and 19 respectively.

With these guys, they'll come up to you and their breathing will start to match yours and they start to just kind of level out with you. They actually claim a horse can sense and hear a human heartbeat four feet away.

I am absolutely proud of this, I really am. It's gone way beyond what I expected it to be. I brought horses on site. I thought, you know, if it makes one officer smile in a day or one staff member for smile in a day, especially if you've, you know, you've had a bad day, you've had a stabbing or, you know, shots fired, whatever the situation is, you bring somebody in and they go in there and they pet these guys, they love them up and that, and that just goes away from their brain. That just goes away for that timeframe. Right. And if that makes one person happy, then absolutely, I'm very happy to offer this to people.

I've always said, if we can help one person here, maybe that person can help the next person and the next person. And it's, it's just the paying it forward aspect.

I'm so happy that these guys have embraced it as well as they have. I can't believe how many people have reached out and said, “you know, having these guys here has just made my whole day, made me smile, made my day happy for the rest of the day. This is amazing.” So that, that makes it worthwhile.

Lift Me Up

Every institution is different with different needs and different problems. At Drumheller we've got a super supportive senior management team that is very pro-detector dog. So we get a lot of motivation here to go out and do our job and to find what we can do to try and prevent the drugs from making it into the institution.

On the search

Jeff
Detector Dog Handler

I'm Jeff Hood and I'm a detector dog handler, institutional search specialist at Drumheller Institution.

The main role of the program is narcotics interdiction. It's to stop drugs from getting into the institution and if the drugs are in the institution is to find them and remove them from the offenders as much as we can.

Generally speaking, I mean the day starts at about five o'clock for me. I'm up with a feed and a cleaning of the kennel and taking care of the dog. Once we're into work, we'll sit down and we'll go over our emails and then we'll go have a meeting with the security intelligence officers and chat with them and find out if there's any potential targets to hit or if we've had any drug movement or drones over the weekend and then we'll base our day off of that. So visits start at 8 30. We'll search every visitor when they come in. We have 12 15 as well when the next round of visits come in. So we'll search the visitors when they come in as well. So the day can is really it's a fluid day. It depends. I mean you might have visitors and then we might go down and do two or three ranges on the unit and see if we can get some drugs out of the unit or some contraband.

I've been dog handler now for just about 15 years and over the 15 years I've had four canines.

So every dog's different but you try to get that seven to nine years with your dog and you'll work exclusively with that dog.

The government owns them, but he's your partner and your responsibility for his care and taking care of him. They spend their off time at home. The Service comes and builds a kennel in your backyard. So the dog is either with you or at your residence.

The program is relatively new. So, one of the newer handlers had come to our institution just as the program started and I saw what they did and I'd always been a dog lover and it just looked really interesting to me. So, I went out and I volunteered with the handlers. Go out and spend time with them and see what the dog did. See what they did. See what their roles were in the institution. And the job just seemed really interesting to me and I pursued it and I was lucky enough to get a spot doing it.

I think the best part of the job is you're paid to play with a dog. Like you're with a dog all day long. So if you're a dog lover that's the best part. The next best part is probably when he does his job and you catch what you need to catch. Whether it's successfully retrieving an item from an inmate or from an inmate's cell or stopping drugs from coming in and you catch a visitor. I think those are probably some of the most rewarding aspects because you're seeing a visible impact on what you're doing when the dog does what he's trained to do and then you stop the drugs and get the drugs.

That's pretty positive.

Tiffany - CORCAN Farms

Well sometimes it's hard when you're trying to get things done and you have to teach somebody at the same time. Farming is very time sensitive, and the weather, so it can slow down the process. Sometimes you have to remember that your first goal is training the offenders and that sometimes when you look at your field, your crop might not be planted exactly as you would have liked to have seen it planted but you've taught somebody something and they've learned.

Harvesting Hope

Tiffany

Farm Supervisor (CORCAN)

Hi, my name is Tiffany and I work at CORCAN Farms.

Today we're in the heifer barn at Collins Bay. We have to teach the offenders how to work with cattle, how to operate equipment. So they can rake, cut hay, help plant, work land, they're involved all across the process.

Here we have offenders milking every day. It's nice when you get to see the offenders come in and some of them don't really like cattle to begin with, or they're afraid of them. You watch them slowly become their pets. And if you wander around the barn here you'll notice that most of our cows are very very friendly, they get lots of attention.

We get very few offenders in that actually come from farms. We have been fortunate that we have had a few, but most of them have not been around cattle at all, and they seem to find it quite rewarding. They like to learn a lot of the tractor stuff, which is also practical when they get out if they want a job like in landscaping and other areas. Farming is so diverse and you have to learn so many different skills that it actually applies to lots of different jobs that are out there.

I feel that when the offenders come to the farm they gain a greater appreciation for how much work goes into things. A lot of them don't realize how much work goes into the food and everything that you eat every day. And it kind of builds appreciation for everything else. It helps them take less stuff for granted. Here they all have to work together so it builds on their abilities to work as a team. Cattle are unpredictable, and that they need to pay attention to things because they're responsible for the lives of the cows.

I guess I'm most proud about the fact that when you're dealing with offenders and seeing the positive changes, and the empathy you see them display around the animals, it gives you some hope that they won't re-offend, and that the farm is being a positive influence on their lives.

Changing Lives.
Protecting Canadian.

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A graphic with vibrant shades of blue and purple features two hands supporting each other and lifting one another up.

The campaign title “Lift Me Up” appears in the center with CSC’s mission of “Changing Lives. Protecting Canadians.”

A graphic with vibrant shades of blue and purple features two hands supporting each other and lifting one another up.

The campaign title “Lift Me Up” appears with CSC’s mission of “Changing Lives. Protecting Canadians.”
In the bottom right-hand corner is the Canada wordmark.

A graphic with vibrant shades of blue and purple features two hands supporting each other and lifting one another up.

The campaign title “Lift Me Up” appears with CSC’s mission of “Changing Lives. Protecting Canadians.”
In the bottom right-hand corner is the Canada wordmark.

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A graphic with vibrant shades of blue and purple features two hands supporting each other and lifting one another up.
The campaign title “Lift Me Up” appears with CSC’s mission of “Changing Lives. Protecting Canadians.”

A graphic with vibrant shades of blue and purple features two hands supporting each other and lifting one another up.
The campaign title “Lift Me Up” appears with CSC’s mission of “Changing Lives. Protecting Canadians.”

A graphic with vibrant shades of blue and purple features two hands supporting each other and lifting one another up.
The campaign title “Lift Me Up” appears with CSC’s mission of “Changing Lives. Protecting Canadians.”