In Lenzburg, a Saint Bernard is doing the unglamorous work of rehabilitation

The prison gym in Lenzburg is hot enough to make anyone question the wisdom of indoor exercise, least of all a Saint Bernard. Yet Ria arrives there every three weeks, drinks from her bowl, and sets about doing something that many policy papers promise and few institutions manage: making people a little less closed off. One inmate, serving a 14-year sentence for a serious robbery and already seven years into it, says the dog visit gives him positive energy and a rare chance to move, play and feel normal for a moment.

That may sound sentimental, but prisons are full of things that sound better in theory than they work in practice. Here the setup is simple: Ria comes with her handler, Konstantin Seiler, who says he is really the assistant and not the star of the show. He also takes the dog to other prisons. Seiler says Ria naturally approaches people and that this helps calm the inmates. He often does not know what they were convicted of, and says that is fine; some talk about their crimes, others do not, even after years.

The idea is hardly Swiss in its originality, which may be part of why it works. Marcel Ruf, the director of JVA Lenzburg, points out that therapy dogs are also used in places such as Texas and California, both in the United States and hardly examples of soft-handed criminal policy. His point is not that prisons should become petting zoos, but that a person who builds a relationship with an animal can become more positive. That is a more serious argument than the usual outrage suggests.

Of course, the usual outrage arrives anyway. As soon as inmates are allowed to stroke a dog as part of a therapeutic programme, someone reaches for the phrase “coddling justice”, as if a prison were meant to be a warehouse for resentment. Ruf rejects that view and instead cites the prison’s legal mandate to promote the social behaviour of inmates. In other words, the institution is not merely there to keep people behind walls; it is also supposed to do something with them while they are there.

By the end of the session, Ria and the inmate have completed an obstacle course in the gym. The dog gets a small treat, the inmate looks relaxed, and the scene ends without ceremony — which is precisely the point. Rehabilitation is rarely theatrical, and most of the time it does not come with a press release. Yet if a dog can lower the temperature in a prison, even briefly, that may tell us more about human behaviour than many grand speeches about punishment ever do.

Written by Martina Kirchner martina.kirchner@alpineweekly.com