How to Change a Life (or two) with a Dog

Eight years ago, Erin Boetzer sat in front of a judge at the Superior Court of Santa Cruz. She faced 55 years in prison for sixteen different charges. She got twelve years and eight months. It wasn’t her first time in that seat, but it would be her last—all because of a few dogs.

About six months into her stay at Folsom Women’s Facility in Folsom, CA, Boetzer started a job as a puppy raiser as part of Canine Companions for Independence’s prison puppy raising program. She spent over two years in the program, and a dog was at her side 24/7. She and a small group of other inmates worked to raise puppies to be service dogs.

Everything about it changed her life. She saw compassion and kindness from everyone around her for the first time. Everyone loves dogs. She became an extension of her dog and felt that love too. She learned how to manage her time and how to be forgiving. She even learned to teach. Everything she missed in a life in and out of prison and addicted to drugs, she got in the dogs.

“It was everything I needed then. At the right moment, at the right time, I was in the right headspace and ready to change and it just all—I mean I catapulted out of there.”

A few months after she was released from prison, she became CCI’s new contract trainer for the San Francisco Chapter of Puppy Raisers. Now, she’s the trainer for the South Bay Chapter as well. Every week, Boetzer teaches a class to puppy raisers and their mix of golden retrievers and black and yellow labs, all training to become either service dogs, hearing dogs, facility dogs, or skilled companions. CCI, along with the pursual of her bachelor’s degree, has kept her committed to staying out of prison and off of drugs for good.

“There is no way I would be forming the bonds, the connections, the self-esteem, the self-worth, the responsibility—I have so much drive now. I owe a lot of it to myself but they shaped me and guided me and allowed it to happen.”

As contract trainer for two Chapters, Boetzer works directly with the puppy raisers and the dogs they train, including both first time puppy raisers and repeat puppy raisers. She teaches a two-hour weekly class for both San Francisco and the South Bay, with the first hour focusing on young puppies, learning basic commands, and the second hour focusing on the older puppies, learning more advanced commands that will lead them into professional training. IN addition to her classes, Boetzer is also available to any puppy raisers through phone, text, and email almost 24/7.

She answers questions big and small. It could be about the care of the puppy or the health of the puppy. She can answer a lot of the basics, like gastrointestinal issues, food and weight management, and anything she can’t answer is directed to the CCI regional veterinarian. She answers questions about temperament and command training as well as behavioral type stuff like house manners.

“Any dog related question, I will answer.”

Boetzer isn’t the only contract trainer employed by CCI, but most of them are focused in the Northwest region of CCI, working out of the original headquarters in Santa Rosa, CA. Every month all contract trainers from the Northwest region call in to CCI for conference call regarding any updates. The contract trainers also go to occasional workshops at the Santa Rosa campus to be updated on any additional training, update current training, and go through any questions or concerns they may have with the current training aspects. It is also a huge collaboration of trainers coming together to offer each other advice on what works to help their puppy raisers.

Otherwise, contract trainers stay in contact with the Puppy Program Manager of their region. This is where trainers speak about specific dogs and any concerns they may have. It isn’t always problems in training, but they always speak about the progress of the dog. Boetzer probably speaks to her PPM every other day.

“I don’t think any trainers talk to them as much as I do, but… I’m constantly texting her.”

Once the dogs go to their respective region’ headquarters for professional training, Boetzer doesn’t get any information about the progress of the dog. As a puppy raiser herself, she knows how painful it can be to not know.

She is training two dogs now, and she had two dogs in professional training, but Dern, a black lab, was just released from professional training. He advanced a few months through professional training, getting extremely close to becoming a service dog. Boetzer doesn’t know if it’s okay to say why he was released, but once he was, she decided to adopt him as a pet. Magic, a golden retriever, is in professional training now, still on track to becoming a service dog. A few months ago, Boetzer picked up eight-week-old puppy Ender. Boetzer also has Max. He is due to go to professional training later this year. She co-raised Max with the Stockton Prison through the prison puppy program, as she wants to stay as involved with the program as she can be.

CCI’s Prison Puppy Raising Program started thirteen years ago at the Coffee Creek Correctional Center in Wilsonville, Oregon and has spread to thirteen facilities throughout the US. Facilities select inmates and the inmates train puppies under the guidance of CCI puppy program managers and contract trainers when available. The puppies are trained in the same way they would be outside the facility, with weekly training classes and daily one-on-one training between inmate and dog. Inmates who partake in the Puppy Prison Raising Program live with and care for their dogs 24/7.

Today, Erin Boetzer sat in front of a desktop camera. She still has a tan and perfectly blended bleach blonde hair even after months of self-isolation. She wore a black short sleeve shirt that read RAISE A PUPPY CHANGE A LIFE. Ender sat in her lap. Max laid on the floor behind her chair. Dern is somewhere just out of frame. A few months ago, she celebrated her 34th birthday at home with her parents and her dogs.

Boetzer spoke to a zoom call full of humans, dogs, and grey screens with the names of people without the technical wherewithal to turn their camera on.

“Please let me know how you guys like our class today. I really need your feedback. Or you can tell Sue or Shari if you hate me and they can tell me anonymously… Actually, don’t tell them that you hate me.”

Since the shelter in place order was called in California, weekly training classes for the puppy raisers of CCI’s future service dogs haven’t been able to happen as they normally do. For the first few weeks, puppy raisers worked on training on their own as Boetzer adjusted to a full-time course load at CSU Monterey Bay as a marketing student. For a few weeks after, Boetzer tried to run class exactly the same as she usually would in person, but over zoom. Spotty connections and fuzzy video feeds made for an unproductive few weeks. Nine Saturdays passed before Boetzer could figure out an efficient way to run a dog training class over video chat, and even then, the kinks weren’t worked out.

The first hour of class focused on the younger dogs. Baby Ender was the perfect assistant. Training dogs and training people to train dogs in person is difficult enough. Over a spotty video feed, it is even more so. Still, Boetzer showed the class each step to completing the under command with a puppy. Under means to go under a table or chair to lay down. On the surface, it seems simple enough, but as Boetzer spends almost ten minutes explaining the steps it takes to get the command perfect it seems harder and harder. After showing the puppy raisers how to do the command with their young puppies, Boetzer uses released dog Dern to show how one would do the command with an older and larger dog.

The puppy raisers who had cameras on attempted to mimic her after she was finished demonstrating. Boetzer stared at the tiny rectangular screens. She told all of them they were doing well, even if she couldn’t really see what they were doing.

After the under, Boetzer had an almost twenty-minute demonstration on grooming. This is crucial for this specific group of raisers, as most of them are first timers. Because of the pandemic, there has been an influx of puppies confined to the North West region of CCI, mostly near the CCI headquarters in Santa Rosa. Repeat puppy raisers were asked to take a puppy if they were able to—there are very specific requirements for how many dogs one can have at a time and at what age your current dog is safe to be around a new puppy. Boetzer was one of the ones asked, and that is why she had puppy Ender—a puppy she wasn’t supposed to get until Max had turned in to professional training in November. When CCI ran out of repeat raisers to ask, they turned to their long waiting list of people trying to raise a puppy for the first time.

Nails are the big scary grooming task. Dogs have what is called the quick inside their nails. It is a blood vessel and nerve, and it is very easy to clip into if you don’t know what you’re doing. Boetzer starts with Ender to show how to best clip the nails of a young puppy. He laid on his back between her legs and got cubes of cheese when he didn’t whine.

Black dogs are a whole different story. On yellow dogs, the quick is visible when looking at the nail. It’s dark brown, while the nails themselves are beige. On black dogs, everything is black. Boetzer brought Dern between her legs too, and he also laid belly up and got cheese cubes. But, to show how to clip his nails, she brought the camera in extremely close. She clipped tiny shavings off his nails and held them up to the camera, waiting for the focus to change, just to show how little she was clipping off. Even then, it was difficult to see, so Boetzer relied on texture to explain when to stop clipping. Once it hits a waxy consistency and a lighter color, the puppy raisers should stop clipping.

The new puppy raisers all praised her for her in depth explanation. Even the repeat, long time puppy raisers found it helpful. The specificity needed now in this new age of virtual living is something Boetzer is well versed in. A lot of change had to happen to get Boetzer to that point.

And she isn’t a stranger to navigating through a drastic change or two.

In mid-2014, Boetzer arrived at the Folsom Women’s Facility. She knew she wanted this to be her last time in prison, but it couldn’t be guaranteed. Boetzer started taking college courses at Lake Tahoe Community College almost as soon as she arrived. She pursued an Associate’s degree in social sciences. She had a 4.0 GPA and she realized she was kind of smart. Still, there was something pulling her back.

For her first six months in Folsom, Boetzer lived in a dorm with 27 other women and one bathroom. She worked as a porter, cleaning common areas and taking inventory and completing tasks for the correctional officers. She was still three years away from getting a gate pass, the one thing that would let her be outdoors and get more coveted jobs. She hated it all.

The Prison Puppy Raising Program started in Folsom a few months after Boetzer arrived. There were only a couple inmates participating at first, and they had been hand selected by the warden.

At Folsom, the Prison Puppy Raising Program meant no dorms. There were 18 individual cells at the facility. Nine on top, nine on bottom. Each cell held two people, and anyone in the puppy program had not another inmate for a roommate, but a dog. That alone made the program popular. The dogs were just an added bonus for most.

Once Boetzer found out about it, she did everything she could to be a part of it. She did her best to integrate herself into the group of women already training puppies and expressed her interest to both them and the prison. It was her chance to avoid a transfer to another prison, Fire Camp, and not get sucked back into a life she no longer wanted. She knew tons of people already in Fire Camp. The one downside to Fire Camp was the drug infestation. If she went there and reacquainted with all the people she knew, she would get sucked right back into everything she wanted to escape. But Folsom would be a rough six years if it continued the way it was.

Reaching out to the other women in the prison worked. One of the inmates in the program told Boetzer that another one of the inmates in the program was likely to be fired. Her true motivation seemed to be the single room, and the dogs weren’t a priority.

Boetzer put in her application immediately. Even though her transfer application was in, and even got approved as she waited, she had to have an answer about the dog program. And the vetting process was lengthy.

They approved her in early 2015. Boetzer had to beg all the higher ups of the prison to pull her already approved transfer.

“You’re in the dog program—we’re holding you,” they told her.

That was when the change really happened. She may have been going to college and been insistent on never going back to prison, but the puppy program is what really assured that to be true.

The change had to happen fast as well. Boetzer became a member of a three-woman team, raising two dogs on a rotating schedule. She had to make deep emotional connections with these women, and that was something unseen in her many years of jail time. Not only did she bond with the puppy program inmates, but she bonded with grieving inmates. Women, any time they lost a loved one or had a life tragedy, could get a visit from an inmate and their puppy-in-training. This is good for the puppy because one of the goals of raising a service dog is to socialize it extremely well. They will spend a majority of their life only around humans, so the more they can meet the better. And these dogs don’t only help the physical ailments of their future partners. They help the emotional ailments too.

The dogs allowed the inmates in the program to bond with other inmates. Any time someone was grieving over a lost love one they could bring a dog in. Boetzer saw countless women sob into the back of her dogs’ necks. To see someone else cry in prison is another rarity. That shows just a fraction of the effect these dogs have.

“The dogs brought me to a family dynamic in there, which is unheard of. We don’t have little families in there where people actually care about each other and open up and show love and happiness and sadness. To grieve together and rejoice together and bond. Do things together all day every day. To bond over the dogs.”

The bonds that she built with her fellow program members were fragile, like all good things in prison. They were tested any time they would train together, whether it be a group of two women working on one dog or the entire team in the weekly training class. At first, the training class was run by the CCI contract trainer for the Sacramento Chapter.

In those first few months, Boetzer realized she was good not only at training the dogs, but also training the humans. There are plenty of good puppy raisers. It seems to be easier to constantly tell a dog what to do rather than tell a person what to do with their dog. Boetzer quickly grasped the specific mechanics of training a dog to be a service dog. Within a few months of being in the program, Boetzer took over the training of her fellow inmates. The CCI contract trainer only came in every two weeks, and only to exchange the dogs currently in the prison to the outside world for a week.

It took a little time to change how she delivered those training mechanics to her fellow inmates.

“Initially I was not very patient. It taught me how to be patient and how to understand that it’s stepping stones. Harping on somebody constantly for not getting something right is not conducive.”

She actually started to change after she heard rumors floating around that she was too harsh, too mean. But I’m just telling them what to do. Boetzer had to learn how to communicate effectively. The women training the dogs also need the love and attention and kindness and understanding and forgiveness and joy. Even the officers and staff of the facility treated them differently.

“We were on a completely different level where they actually treated us like people instead of numbers.”

The whole process was one of re-humanization. She had to struggle through unlearning what she thought she knew about herself. I’m a drug dealer. I’m a piece of shit. I will only ever be a drug dealer. This is my life. And it was her life. It had been her life since her formative years, and those kinds of habits are hard to break.

Boetzer grew up in Scotts Valley, CA, on ninety acres of land. She had loving parents. Her mother was an ER doctor and her father was a mechanical engineer in Silicon Valley. She was on track to have a normal life

Then, she was raped for the first time in eighth grade. She was raped four more times between then and age 21. She never really told anybody then.

The second time it happened, Boetzer catapulted in the opposite direction. It was too difficult to deal with alone. Without anyone to believe you.

She went to her friend’s house one night to drink and hang out. The girl’s parents and siblings were all gone. The friend invited two guys. They all drank.

Then one of the guys took Boetzer into the friend’s sister’s room and beat her senseless. Then he raped her. Then he left her.

The friend’s parents found Boetzer the next morning, naked and bloody on the bed and choking on her own vomit. They put a blanket over her and turned her on her side. When she woke up, they asked her if she was going to tell her parents she got drunk or if they had to. They ignored the blood that gushed out of her nose when she sat up, a product of a punch to the nose from the night before.

She said she would. So, she told her parents she got drunk and no adults were home. That was it.

She hadn’t really told anyone at school either. Eventually she confided in someone, and that someone told her that the guy had been spreading rumors that they’d had sex. The girl, Boetzer’s ‘friend,’ had been telling everyone how much of a slut Boetzer was. She knew her friend liked that guy and had slept with him anyways.

The other times were all similar. Boetzer had been asking for it. It was her fault.

To deal with all her supposed wrongdoings, she turned to drinking. And drinking turned to hanging out with the wrong crowd. The wrong crowd turned to drugs. Those all turned to minor run ins with the law. After finding out how expensive addiction can be, the drug use turned to drug dealing. Then the run ins with the law got worse.

“I am the kind of person that, if I am doing something, I am going all in and I am going to be the best at whatever it is I’m doing,” Boetzer said about her decision to start dealing. “So, when it’s good it’s great but when it’s bad it’s bad.”

That inherent dedication worked in her favor when she paroled in August of 2017. Boetzer moved back in with her parents on their ninety acres of land. She stayed in contact with CCI the entire time, begging to be excused from the usual year long wait list for new puppy raisers. As of last year, Boetzer knew that everybody that has been in the prison puppy raising program that has been released has not returned. If the statistic has changed since, it would maybe be one reoffender. The women that trained alongside her in prison have gotten out and not returned, and they were all multiple offenders, just like Boetzer. They aren’t as fortunate as Boetzer though. Not everyone had a family to fall back on or financial support to fall back on. Not everyone had a new degree and a 4.0 GPA.

Right before she got out, Boetzer heard more rumors, this time from the correctional officers. They had been taking to CCI about here. They told her things were happening for her.

Soon after she got out, CCI allowed her to puppy raise and she made sure they knew she was interested in contract training if there was any need. In January of 2018, just five months after getting out of prison, Boetzer began contract training in San Francisco, and after than eventually began in the South Bay.

Today, brand new puppy raisers don’t even know Boetzer was part of the program. At least, she doesn’t talk about it with them. She doesn’t want to be known as the “prison girl.” When she first started training, she got a lot more questions. While training the San Francisco chapter, Boetzer began participating in prison exchange programs for the dogs. The puppy raisers of the chapter had to as well. Some of the puppy raisers who were set to trade their dogs for a prison-raised dog were concerned about giving their babies up. It can be a difficult prejudice to look past, and Boetzer even struggles with it from time to time. But she ultimately knows that no harm will come to the dogs.

“They will die for those dogs. Nothing bad is going to happen,” she reassured them. “If anything, your dog is going to come out more spoiled and loved than anything. And fabulous with commands. They are 24/7 they have nothing else going on. It is all dog for the entire time they’re in there.”

Most of Boetzer’s interactions with the puppy raisers are positive, however. Once they hear her story, they feel inspired and proud. Some have told her that her story gives them hope that someone in their life in addiction can come out of it. It hit particularly hard for a puppy raiser living in Southern California. She and Boetzer had met before on a trip to Disneyland, a trip that actually went viral for because of the pictures of the dogs in training around the park, and spoke often through Facebook.

Boetzer was in the region to give a speech about her life. The same woman with whom Boetzer shared a few seconds of internet fame brought her sister—a struggling addict that had just recently gotten out of jail. The two sisters were brought to tears by Boetzer’s speech.

She has to remember that she was once that addict—that criminal.

“These are people. They’re not just that—they have a story. They have something. There’s a reason why they are the way they are and there’s a chance for them to change they just need to find it.”

But finding that change wasn’t easy for Boetzer. She happened to have the perfect circumstances to get into the program but not everyone is that lucky. She needed something to change her, and dogs happened to do the trick. Some turn to religion and some to other things. Some stay exactly the same and some get pushed even further back. Some will never find what helps them heal.

“To me this is my religion. It’s my everything.”