At the Monroe County detention center on Stock Island in the Florida Keys, most of the prisoners do the type of work you\u2019d typically imagine people doing in jail. Preparing meals in the kitchens, cleaning the common areas, working in the laundry, and so on.<\/p>\n
But for about five prisoners at a time the work looks a little more exotic. They\u2019re working in the jail\u2019s on-site zoo, taking care of animals including a capybara, a kinkajou, a zebu and an ostrich.<\/p>\n
The zoo was started in 1994, after a sheriff\u2019s deputy noticed that ducks living near the jail were often getting hit by cars while crossing a highway. He gathered a group of prisoners and relocated the flock to a disused area beneath the jail, which sits on stilts as it is in a hurricane-prone area.<\/p>\n
Word of the rescue spread, and people started showing up at the jail to drop off rescued or unwanted animals. \u201cPeople started bringing in a goat, a pig, a cow, pets they\u2019d gotten that they didn\u2019t want or couldn\u2019t keep,\u201d said Jeanne Selander, the zoo\u2019s supervisor. \u201cWe got a blind horse from the Miami area that had been abandoned, and then the sheriff thought, \u2018Well, there\u2019s a need for this.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The Monroe County detention center is the only correctional facility in the world with its own zoo. There was, briefly, another one. In Venezuela, a gang took over a prison and installed various resort-style amenities for the prisoners, including a pool, night club, and a zoo, with big cats, monkeys and flamingoes. But the Venezuelan government forcefully retook control<\/a> of that prison a few years ago. Several of the zoo\u2019s animals were reportedly killed in the battle for the prison and the ones that survived were relocated.<\/p>\n Jeanne Selander, the supervisor of the zoo at the Monroe County detention center, with Thunder the Zebu in September 2026<\/p>\n According to Selander, all of the animals in her zoo were either rescued, donated or confiscated. Rocky the fox was rescued from a fur farm in Minnesota. Jack the ostrich was donated as a tax write-off by a breeder that was unable to sell him because he\u2019s blind in one eye. Harriet Houdini, a red-tailed boa constrictor, was donated by a school after the teacher that kept her as a class pet retired. \u201cI had some alligators one time that came from a raid on a crack house,\u201d said Selander.<\/p>\n But the zoo doesn\u2019t accept all of the animals it is offered. Selander said she previously declined a camel and a bear as they presented too much of a risk to the residents.<\/p>\n You are unable to see the zoo from the inside as the building\u2019s windows are frosted. Selander said that, when she is upstairs in the jail, the prisoners will ask her about the sounds they can hear coming from outside. She has been told that, from inside the jail, the peacock can sound like a woman screaming.<\/p>\n The prisoners that work on the zoo spend around six hours a day feeding and cleaning the animals, and performing maintenance tasks. Those selected are typically low-level offenders and are not allowed to have charges for violence or animal abuse. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of hard to get down [to the zoo] because if you have a high bond or you\u2019re in any way shape or form a risk to run away, they\u2019re not going to let you come outside,\u201d said Peter Faraco, a former inmate who worked on the zoo in 2021.<\/p>\n Inside the jail, prisoners sleep on concrete bunk beds with no pillows. \u201cStuck in them cells all day, or in the kitchen; it\u2019s not that nice,\u201d said Rodney Cox, who previously worked on the zoo. \u201cThere\u2019s no air.\u201d<\/p>\n Boredom is also an issue. \u201cIt\u2019s a lot of time,\u201d said Nicholas Sheldrake, a current inmate who is working in the zoo. \u201cIt\u2019s just very boring. Watching the same TV shows and movies over and over, hoping a football or baseball game or something comes on.\u201d<\/p>\n The zoo offers a respite for the prisoners that get to work there. \u201cI love it down here,\u201d said Sheldrake. \u201cIt makes my time go by fast. Nobody bothers me. I love working with the animals and talking to them.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAnd we can see stuff like birds and trees,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n It is important to Selander that the zoo not look like it is part of a jail, as she hopes to make it appealing to visitors on the zoo\u2019s regular open days. She has planted trees around the property, and had inmates paint murals of animals on the walls and support pillars. \u201cPeople will come in, they\u2019re like, \u2018You don\u2019t even realize you\u2019re at a jail,\u2019\u201d she said.<\/p>\n In the 20 years she has worked there, she said, the number of visitors on open days has grown from about a dozen to more than 300.<\/p>\n Studies<\/a> have shown that access to animals can have a positive effect<\/a> on incarcerated people, leading to improvements in mental health<\/a>, as well as a decrease in reoffending after release.<\/p>\n Peter Faraco, a then-inmate in the Monroe County detention center, with several animals in the jail\u2019s on-site zoo in July 2021<\/p>\n There are animal programmes of various kinds in prisons around the world. There are prisoners in Chile living alongside cats, and in New Zealand training service dogs, and in the UK receiving equine therapy, and in South Africa raising birds. Selander said that she believes working on the zoo has had a positive effect on the prisoners she has worked with, and has, over the years, received positive feedback from her workers.<\/p>\n She was recently out for brunch and her server was a man who\u2019d worked at the zoo. \u201cHe was like, \u2018I wanted to thank you, Miss Jeannie \u2026 Being able to be on the farm and have peace while I served my time just made it so much easier,\u2019\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Selander said that it\u2019s not uncommon for former incarcerated zoo workers to come back and visit during open days to see the animals. Some will bring their family members. \u201cOne of the greatest compliments is that the inmates want to come back to visit,\u201d she said. \u201cWhat a compliment. Who wants to come back to jail?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the Monroe County detention center on Stock Island in the Florida Keys, most of the prisoners do…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":434803,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[28,30,29],"class_list":["post-434802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=434802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434802\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/434803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}