Gloria Gilbert Stoga is the founder of Puppies Behind Bars (PBB), a Manhattan-based organization that partners puppies with incarcerated individuals. These individuals will train and raise the puppies to serve as bomb-sniffers, veteran servicers, and police dogs. Stoga founded PBB in 1997, and since its inception, PBB has raised dogs to serve first responders after 9/11, veterans after the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, people affected by the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, and even healthcare workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. They have even provided dogs to four public service departments at Ivy League universities: Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and Brown’s own service dog, Elvy. For over 25 years, Stoga has championed PBB to adapt to the ever-changing needs of the nation, all while breaking down barriers between police officers and incarcerated individuals. PBB gets people to see “beyond the green and beyond the blue.”
Eiffel Sunga: Why exactly did you establish Puppies Behind Bars?
Gloria Gilbert Stoga: A veterinarian in Florida, Dr. Thomas Lane, came up with the idea. I read about it in People Magazine and thought it was brilliant. I tracked him down and went to three jails he was operating. I figured out what I would do the same and what I would do differently. When I read the article, it hit me in my gut. It made sense to give people who are incarcerated a second chance, not only at their rehabilitation but a chance for them to contribute to society. Given how much I love animals, it was a no-brainer that dogs could be the conduit for that second chance.
ES: And when did you really start to see the impact of your organization?
GGS: Immediately. My husband loves to tell the following anecdote: I put four puppies into the women’s prison the night before Thanksgiving, 1997. That was a Wednesday night. At 10 o’clock Saturday night, the phone rings, and my husband picks it up. This deep, booming voice said, “May I speak to Mrs. Stoga?” My husband hand handed the phone to me, and this man identified himself as a lieutenant from Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. He said, “I’m calling because I went to the housing unit where the puppies are, I got down on my knees and felt one of the puppies noses—I think it’s warm.” At that point, my husband and I looked at each other and said, “That’s it! Success!”
Here’s this guy, he was huge—like the size of a refrigerator! I envisioned him in a women’s maximum security prison getting down on his knees, being worried, going all the way back to his office, and calling me at home. That kind of concern, that kind of “we’re all in this together to make sure these puppies will be safe,” really said it all. We’ve had problems since then. You don’t work in correctional facilities, with veterans, with police officers without there being problems. You don’t have to be incarcerated to know that the environment is really tough and negative. Just having a doggy there that you can pet or check on humanizes both prison staff and all the incarcerated people in the facility.
ES: In your brochure, I read that PBB started with blind people and that the program also went through an evolution after 9/11. Could you explain the work you did there and the impact 9/11 had on the organization?
GGS: When I started in 1997, we were just doing guide dogs for the blind. Then, September 11 happened. I live in New York. We are a Manhattan-based organization, and I wanted to say thank you to all of the law enforcement agencies that just descended on the city. There were people here from agencies I had never heard of, there were snipers on rooftops, I mean, we were flooded with law enforcement. I wanted to say thank you. So it made sense that the way that Puppies Behind Bars could do that would be providing bomb sniffing dogs to them. It took me until May 2002 to get Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) to agree to get our dogs. In those months between September and May, I was making relationships. I was trying to get law enforcement to realize dogs raised in prison were gonna be okay.
ES: You mentioned how it was difficult for police officers to trust dogs that were raised in prison. How have you tried to change people’s minds on that?
GGS: When ATF accepted our dogs, that was the watershed. The ATF agents would test the dogs in a two-week period called team training, where active duty police officers come into prison for two weeks and train with the incarcerated individuals. Officers walk through prison, go through the medical detectors, take off their belts, and lock up their guns. They’re vulnerable. They’re scared out of their minds. The incarcerated individuals are nervous wrecks. They’re gonna be working with people who’ve spent their careers arresting and locking people up. And now they’re meeting inside a prison over the love of a dog. There’s a common bond that forms.
Every day we end class doing a command that Puppies Behind Bars made up called Tell Me a Story. You get on the floor, and you say to your doggy, “Tell Me a Story.” Your dog will curl up into your lap, and you can tell your dog anything. You can tell her some of the worst domestic violence cases you ever had to respond to. You can tell her that you’re having problems at home and you’re drinking too much. You can tell her that you’re feeling burnt out because the community hates cops these days. You can tell your dog anything.
We end every single day with all of the police officers, all the incarcerated individuals, and all the doggies getting in a circle on the floor. It is such an equalizer. You’ve got people who are all physically vulnerable. They’re in down positions on the floor—cops sitting next to incarcerated individuals and vice versa—and people open up their hearts. By day three or four, you’ve got police officers breaking into sobs during Tell Me a Story. That vulnerability is how you break down barriers. You bring people of very disparate views together over one common factor. In our case, the common factor happens to have four legs and a tail. I like to say that Puppies Behind Bars gets people to see beyond the green and beyond the blue because in New York State, incarcerated individuals wear green uniforms, and police officers wear blue.
ES: I know that PBB has been involved in many events: You guys were there after 9/11, after Afghanistan, then Sandy Hook as well, and even Covid-19. How did you manage to adapt your services to help different people throughout all these periods of time?
GGS: How do we adapt? Where there’s a will, there’s a way. When we wanted to do something to help Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans, we made up 12 or 14 of our own commands specifically for veterans. We work with these constituencies—we’re smart, we can figure out what they might need from our dogs that we hadn’t provided before.
During Covid-19, we worked with doctors, nurses, and the National Guard when New York City was the hotspot for the country. FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) was bringing in nurses and doctors from literally all over the country, and they were put up in huge empty hotels in New York City. I got a call from the National Guard one day saying, “Would you bring dogs to the Javits Center?” The Javits Center is a huge convention center in New York. Turns out the Javits Center was a hospital. So I said, “Of course, I’ll bring dogs.” They didn’t want the dogs in a hospital setting, for obvious reasons, but we figured out a way dogs could service the doctors and the nurses.
There were buses that came to the hotels and took doctors and nurses at 6:30 in the morning to hospitals in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan. They’d get off 14-15 hours later, and we would be there to meet them. At first, for several weeks, the doctors and the nurses would get off the bus, they’d see the dogs, they’d pet the doggies, maybe throw a ball down these long empty hallways, then they’d disappear into their rooms. Nobody would see them again until 6:30 the next morning when they came to get on the bus.
A head nurse came to me and said, “This isn’t healthy. They can’t just have been in a hospital for 12, 14, 16 hours, come home and lock themselves in their rooms.” So we used the dogs as ploys. We said, “You can’t pet a doggy after you get off the bus. You have to go to your room, disinfect, then come down to the lobby. The dogs will be waiting.” That was a way we got the doctors and nurses to not self-isolate. Not only did they play with dogs, but they also started talking to each other. They’d sit and eat a crappy muffin and a crappy granola bar, have somebody to talk to, and have a dog there. That’s part of how Puppies Behind Bars has evolved. A lot of common sense: Here’s a problem, we know dogs can solve it, but what do we humans have to put in place to solve it?
ES: Speaking of how long PBB has been around, I saw that at one point, you were gonna leave PBB. What affected your decision to do that, and why did you ultimately stick around?
GGS: I stuck around because the board did not find a successor. They were going to have an interim successor, and I didn’t think that was a good idea for the organization. I got worried that the organization might flounder or stand still, neither of which we do. It’s not in our DNA—we’re always responding to the world. Also, it sounds silly, but I didn’t realize how important Puppies Behind Bars was to me. I would’ve been bereft if I had left.
ES: So, what else do you see in the future for Puppies Behind Bars? Any goals?
GGS: I don’t know. We respond to the world at large. We’re talking about putting dogs into schools because there’s a mental health crisis with kids post-Covid-19. If we can figure out how our dogs can help that community and how we can maintain the strict requirements for who gets our dogs, that could be the next thing. Or, America could be at war again before we know it—then we’re back to working with active duty veterans coming home. I have absolutely no idea, but we are nimble enough that we can pivot. That’s one thing I’m proud of: We’re not a bureaucracy. When there’s a need, we can say, “Okay, we can figure this out. Let’s go in and fill that void.”
ES: Are there any constraints you see in having a smaller team?
GGS: Sure. I mean, all of us do double duty. A lot of us work on weekends. We’re not at a desk all day, but we’re on-call to the prisons. Volunteers can call us 24/7 if they’ve got questions. If we had a larger staff, that would be spread out amongst more people. But the pluses outweigh that. As a small group, we support one another. We all like each other, and we get along because it’s easier to get along with 11 people than it is to get along with 90 people, right?
ES: That being said, how can our readers be involved with Puppies Behind Bars?
GGS: If your readers know police departments—they could be university, college, community, city, or fire departments—that might need or want a facility dog, they should say to apply to Puppies Behind Bars. It’s free of charge. If they could help us spread the word to police and fire departments, that would be great. Also, if any of your readers know somebody who might have post-traumatic stress because they’re a veteran or a first responder, tell them to come to Puppies Behind Bars. We provide the dog completely free of charge, all the training free of charge. Your readers could do us a great benefit by spreading the word.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity