In modern Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), discovering and developing individuals’ strengths, values, and aspirations are emphasized throughout treatment, drawing on important principles from Recovery-Oriented Cognitive Therapy (CT-R). Connection, meaning, and purpose become powerful tools that motivate people to overcome challenges, learn important skills, and develop resilience as they work toward their goals.
Recently, we connected with New Leash on Life, a nonprofit organization in Philadelphia that uses animal-assisted therapy to help justice-impacted individuals tap into their strengths and develop patience and empathy, all while learning that they can do difficult things. Individuals train and care for shelter dogs and attend regular group classes in which they learn behavioral and cognitive skills like emotion regulation, decision-making, and anger management, and receive employment coaching.
We were interested in how this program puts into practice strategies from both CBT and CT-R by harnessing the power of the relationship between humans and dogs. We spoke with Senior Vice President of Programs, Rob Rosa, about the organization’s success in helping justice-impacted individuals build resilience as they make the often-difficult transition from prison back into their communities.
Beck Institute: Could you tell us a bit about your program and about the services you provide to individuals who are incarcerated?
Rob Rosa: We work with individuals who are incarcerated in the county prison here in Philadelphia. We utilize the powerful dynamics of the human-animal bond to reach the individuals and build trust between the service provider and the individual. We use an animal-assisted therapy approach. The dogs that we use are slated to be euthanized at the city shelter. We place those dogs in the prison, and the individuals who are incarcerated in the Philadelphia prison system live with the dogs for 11 weeks. They’re responsible for taking care of the dog, walking the dog, feeding the dog, and bathing the dog.
They work with a dog trainer to teach the dogs how to sit, how to walk on a leash, not to destroy things, or to chew on things. And then we have a vet tech that goes in one hour a week and teaches how to care for the dog, bathing the dog, brushing the dog’s teeth, cutting their nails. In addition to that, the vet tech is also teaching them proper ownership of a dog.
And then in addition to that, we have a licensed social worker once or twice a week, and she meets with the individuals in groups and teaches them life skills that cover everything from anger management, decision making, and self-care, up to and including restorative justice.
And we have an employment specialist who works with them on basic skills for interviewing, how to dress, and how to present and communicate during the interview. In addition to that, we’re teaching them how to conduct themselves in a workplace and how to work as a team.
Beck Institute: What services do you provide to individuals after they are released?
Rob Rosa: After release, we provide 90 days of services. We send individuals to work at different places, and they meet once a week for an hour with our social worker just to check in, see how they’re doing, and if there are any challenges that they’re experiencing as they are making that transition from prison back into the community and back into the lives of their families. That can look very different for everybody, and the social worker helps them navigate that.
And then our employment specialist is working during those 90 days to get them placed in sustainable permanent employment.
We do work with individuals that struggle with substance use, with mental health, some co-occurring. Some individuals who’ve been diagnosed with substance use disorders are still in stage one of the stages of change. And we do a lot of engagement for those individuals to try to get them to accept that there is a problem. Their life is now in turmoil and there are resources and help for them. And if they are open to that, we work with them to find a path that would be best for them and that would interest them.
Outside of that, we also have a community program where we work with youth offenders aged 18 to 24 who have their first encounter with the criminal legal system, and with those individuals we do the same thing. We do work with the dogs.
Listen as Rob Rosa discusses his powerful personal path to New Leash on Life.
Beck Institute: Can you talk more about the skills training aspect of your program and how the skills training fits in with the work you’re doing with the dogs?
Rob Rosa: The social worker focuses on building emotional and cognitive skills—the changes in thinking and behavior. We do that through different lessons that we have for different topics, whether it’s anger, whether it’s decision making, or mastering your emotions. We have group discussions—real conversations where we’re not trying to put barriers in front of the people who want to say exactly what it is that they’re feeling and why they’re feeling the way that they are. Because sometimes being in a prison setting is not easy. It’s not an easy environment to live in, so you can imagine that they’re coming into these groups with a lot of different types of feelings. We provide them with a safe space. There’s no prison administration in the room and we have those real conversations.
And then we talk about ways that we can develop skills to cope. Those things that we’re experiencing while we’re incarcerated and how those coping skills can be utilized when we transition out into the community, where it is not a controlled setting.
The social worker does a lot of that. There’s a lot of conversation that goes into our life skills class. We go deep into it. We talk about trauma and how that’s related to a lot of decisions and risk-taking, and health issues.
The dog training is for the dogs, but a lot of it is really training for the humans. The way that the dog coach approaches dog training is combining the training with your personal life and the values that you are developing as a dog trainer. So the dog training supports what they’re doing in life skills. There are times when individuals say, “Oh, this feels like I’m in [the social worker’s] class.” Yes, because it’s kind of the same.
And then the basic animal care is where they’re really developing all of the responsibility, the nurturing, and the empathy, which are also life skills. But by doing animal care, you’re actually expressing it. We get dogs that are emaciated. Some of them have tumors. They’ve been through the ringer—fight wounds all over them. And the individuals get to express empathy.
Over and over when we do these different cohorts, the individual says, “I learned to be patient.” I think that a lot of motivating factors to make decisions about drugs are relating to the need for instant gratification. And a lot of the people that we work with say the same thing, right? “How fast can we get to that dollar, to that drug, to whatever?” And with the dogs, we’ve got to do it on their terms. We want them to allow the dog to think and let the dog do [the desired behavior] on its own, right? We don’t use our hands. We don’t do anything. It’s all force free. And that’s where we learn a lot of patience.
I think that the one other thing that I hear a lot of our participants say is that it’s an unconditional acceptance. The dog doesn’t care what baggage we come with. It doesn’t care about our rap sheet. It doesn’t care about the bad decisions we made in the past. It’s happy to see us. And it wants to be with us, exactly where we are.