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California prisons task inmates with raising service dogs as form of rehabilitation 90%
4/23/2026, 12:33:16 AM
BS Summary: This video contains 29 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Halo Effect, and Post Hoc (False Cause), with Overconfidence Bias as the most egregious example at 22% saturation with 181 hits. Analysis detected 1,934 faulty-reasoning hits from 824 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 84.8% and a BS Rank of 90% (1,691 of 16,813 videos). This video is worse (more manipulative) than 89.90% of the video peer group.
The Prison Policy Initiative says 96% of people in prison will one day return to their communities.
Then the goal is keeping former inmates out.
That's why California's system is leaning into rehabilitation.
Darrow takes us inside a California facility where one of the methods involves puppies, including one who is a very familiar face right here at CBS News 24/7.
This was not your typical prison visit.
It was a reunion between man's best friend and a man who's made major mistakes in life.
That's a Scoop, a service dog in training.
And Isaac Sansone, an inmate at the California Healthcare Facility in Stockton.
She looks like she's doing great.
So I feel really good.
Sansone is one of a handful of inmates granted permission to participate in what's known as the BARC program.
So this is the dog dorm?
We got nine individuals, stock handlers living in here.
Heavily vetted inmates with clean prison records train service dogs for Canine Companions, a non-profit that will pair the dogs with people with disabilities for free.
Sansone spent a month with Scoop.
As the inmates get these dogs ready to change the lives of people they've never met, the dogs end up changing the trajectory of the inmates lives, too.
Every incarcerated person that's been through this program has paroled and none of them have come back.
Jasmine Gin oversees rehabilitation programs at the prison.
Using incarcerated persons, they become incarcerated because they had a selfish mentality.
So when they come here and they're given a service dog, it's completely 100% where they have to be selfless.
Scoop, yeah.
This is an opportunity for me to give back to the community that I took from.
Sansone is about 10 years into a 25-to-life sentence for murder.
He won't be eligible for parole for almost 7 years.
He says nothing can change the past, but this program allows him to do good for humans that he may never meet.
We've made horrible mistakes, but we're redeemable.
There's people in here in prison who are genuinely remorseful for what they did.
You're one of those people that is remorseful, I
take it. I lost myself. Like I really lost myself to my gang lifestyle, to my criminal thinking.
So when I started to be able to understand that I could actually give back and be selfless, I found myself again. I found my humanity.
Thanks to dogs like Scoop.
I understood what compassion, empathy, responsibility, accountability really meant.
Training that goes two ways in an unexpected place.
We actually get to give back.
We get a give our time to help somebody else in need for the rest of their life.
With positive outcomes within and beyond the prison walls.
So you saw the story and now Max Darrow and Scoop are here with us and we should note that Scoop, the sweet pup, is trained by our executive producer Jennifer Williams.
So we get to see Scoop in the newsroom each and every day.
Let me tell you what good medicine in a newsroom.
>> That's amazing.
Now this program that you highlighted, it's nationwide, right?
>> not only in California. In fact, Canine Companions works with 25 different prison facilities all around the country.
Over 1,500 incarcerated volunteers have been able to participate.
As Jasmine noted in the piece, by the way, every incarcerated participant who has gone through the program in Stockton and has paroled afterwards has not committed another crime and returned to prison.
Canine Companions overall has seen a really low recidivism rate nationwide.
That's that's the bonus.
I just went through traffic getting to work today and standing next to Scoop, I'm already calm.
Don't you get that sense?
>> 100%. Think about this. She's a sitting here on this high chair and just making us all feel so comfortable.
>> Um so in about a month Scoop will head back to Canine Companions for 6 months of advanced training.
Are you ready for that?
>> I think she is.
And you know what? If she passes, Jewels, she will then be able to be paired with somebody in need of a service dog.
So that's where this gets really special.
>> Yeah, and I guess only about 50% of dogs graduate.
So interestingly enough, dogs raised in the prison programs, what they have a higher success rate um than than most that don't, right?
>> Yeah, it's probably something to do with how well they are trained and the amount of time that goes into it.
So if you want to learn more about this, you can volunteer, you can train a pup like Scoop.
canine.org is the place to go.
Boy, someone's going to be very lucky to have Scoop forever.
Thank you for the story.
Thank you, Scoop.
You get some treats.
All right.
Thanks.
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