Cats Filled the Prison. Then the Inmates Fell in Love.

Some say they had been first introduced in to take out the rats. Others contend they wandered in on their very own.

What everybody can agree on — together with those that have lived or labored at Chile’s largest jail the longest — is that the cats had been right here first.

For many years, they’ve walked alongside the jail’s excessive partitions, sunbathed on the steel roof and skittered between cells crowded with 10 males every. To jail officers, they had been a peculiarity of types, and principally ignored. The cats saved multiplying into the lots of.

Then jail officers realized one thing else: The feline residents weren’t solely good for the rat drawback. They had been additionally good for the inmates.

“They’re our companions,” stated Carlos Nuñez, a balding prisoner exhibiting off a 2-year-old tabby he named Feita, or Ugly, from behind jail bars. While caring for a number of cats throughout his 14-year sentence for residence housebreaking, he stated he found their particular essence, in contrast with, say, a cellmate or perhaps a canine.

“A cat makes you worry about it, feed it, take care of it, give it special attention,” he stated. “When we were outside and free, we never did this. We discovered it in here.”

Known merely as “the Pen,” the 180-year-old essential penitentiary in Santiago, Chile’s capital, has lengthy been generally known as a spot the place males dwell in cages and cats roam free. What is now extra clearly understood is the optimistic impact of the jail’s roughly 300 cats on the 5,600 human residents.

The felines’ presence “has changed the inmates’ mood, has regulated their behavior and has strengthened their sense of responsibility with their duties, especially caring for animals,” stated the jail’s warden, Col. Helen Leal González, who has two cats of her personal at residence, Reina and Dante, and a set of cat collectible figurines on her desk.

“Prisons are hostile places,” she added in her workplace, carrying a good bun, billy membership and fight boots. “So of course, when you see there’s an animal giving affection and generating these positive feelings, it logically causes a change in behavior, a change in mindset.”

Prisoners informally undertake the cats, work collectively to look after them, share their meals and beds and, in some instances, have constructed them little homes. In return, the cats present one thing invaluable in a lockup infamous for overcrowding and squalid circumstances: love, affection and acceptance.

“Sometimes you’ll be depressed and it’s like she senses that you’re a bit down,” stated Reinaldo Rodriguez, 48, who’s scheduled to be imprisoned till 2031 on a firearms conviction. “She comes and glues herself to you. She’ll touch her face to yours.”

He was referring to Chillona, a relaxed black cat that has change into the darling of a nine-man cell filled with bunk beds. Mr. Rodriguez stated he and his cellmates used a bowl of water to coax Chillona out of hiding after her earlier inmate caretaker was moved to a different part of the jail.

“Little by little, she would approach us,” he stated. “Now she’s the owner of this room. She’s the boss.” Several cellmates every claimed that his mattress was her favourite.

The pairing of convicted criminals and animals is hardly new. During World War II, German prisoners of struggle in New Hampshire adopted wildlife as pets, together with, in accordance with one account, a bear cub.

Formal packages to attach prisoners and animals grew to become extra widespread within the late Nineteen Seventies, and after constantly optimistic outcomes, they’ve expanded internationally, together with to Japan, the Netherlands and Brazil.

They have change into significantly fashionable within the United States. In Arizona, prisoners practice wild horses to patrol the U.S. border with Mexico. In Minnesota and Michigan, prisoners practice canine for the blind and deaf. And in Massachusetts, prisoners assist look after wounded or sick wildlife, like hawks, coyotes and raccoons.

Connecting inmates and canine has repeatedly been proven to result in “a decrease in recidivism, improved empathy, improved social skills and a safer and more positive relationship between inmates and prison officials,” stated Beatriz Villafaina-Domínguez, a researcher in Spain who reviewed 20 separate research of such packages.

Dogs have been the commonest animal utilized by prisons, adopted by horses, and in most packages, animals are dropped at the inmates, or vice versa. In Chile, nonetheless, the inmates developed an natural connection to the stray cats who dwell alongside them.

Yet there was a time when the connection was not so optimistic. A decade in the past, the cat inhabitants was increasing uncontrolled and plenty of cats had been getting sick, together with growing a contagious an infection that left some cats blind. The scenario “even stressed out the inmates themselves,” stated Carla Contreras Sandoval, a jail social employee with two cat tattoos.

So in 2016, jail officers lastly allowed volunteers to come back look after the cats. A Chilean group referred to as the Felinnos Foundation has since labored with Humane Society International to systematically gather all the cats to deal with, spay and neuter them. They have now reached practically each one.

The program’s success has been partly due to the inmates, Ms. Sandoval stated. The prisoners gather cats that want care and produce them to the volunteers.

On a current day, 4 girls lugged cat carriers into the jail grounds, on the hunt for a lot of felines, together with Lucky, Aquila, Dropón and her six new kittens, and Mr. Nuñez’s cat, Ugly.

The courtyard was chaotic, packed for an inmate soccer match, however prisoners politely made approach for the ladies.

Quickly, males cradling cats in tattooed arms got here bounding down stairs alongside the courtyard, handing animals by jail bars to the volunteers. In one cease, Denys Carmona Rojas, 57, a prisoner serving eight years on gun costs, doted on a litter of kittens in a field. He stated he had helped elevate many kittens in his cell, recounting one case through which he fed particular milk to a litter after the mom died throughout delivery.

“You dedicate yourself to the cat. You tend to it, keep an eye on it, give it love,” he stated, smiling to indicate off lacking entrance enamel. “The feeling that comes out of that — there’s nothing bad about it, man.”

Like the inmates, the cats’ residing circumstances fluctuate by part of the jail. During a recess interval in one of the vital crowded areas, the place 250 prisoners share 26 cells, prisoners packed a slim passageway, with garments drying overhead and cats darting between their ft.

Eduardo Campos Torreblanca, who’s serving three years for aggravated theft, stated every cell cared for no less than one cat, however his kitten had not too long ago died. “He was tiny, a baby,” he stated. “And someone stepped on him.”

When the volunteers first arrived in 2016, they counted practically 400 cats, a determine that not noted new child kittens and a big cat colony that principally caught to the roof. Now that quantity has been steadily declining.

Why? Consider Mr. Nuñez, the home-burglary convict with two years left on his sentence.

When he’s freed, what would occur to his cat, Ugly? That was simple, he stated. “She’s coming with me.”