First cats took over this prison. Then they stole its prisoners’ hearts

“Prisons are hostile places,” she added in her office, wearing a tight bun, truncheon and combat boots. “So of course, when you see there’s an animal giving affection and generating these positive feelings, it logically causes a change in behaviour, a change in mindset.”

Prisoners informally adopt the cats, work together to care for them, share their food and beds and, in some cases, have built them little houses. In return, the cats provide something invaluable in a lock-up notorious for overcrowding and squalid conditions: love, affection and acceptance.

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

The pairing of convicted criminals and animals is hardly new. During World War II, German prisoners of war in New Hampshire adopted wildlife as pets, including, according to one account, a bear cub.

Formal programs to connect prisoners and animals became more common in the late 1970s, and after consistently positive results, they have expanded worldwide, including to Japan, the Netherlands and Brazil.

They have become particularly popular in the United States. In Arizona, prisoners train wild horses to patrol the US border with Mexico. In Minnesota and Michigan, prisoners train dogs for the blind and deaf. And in Massachusetts, prisoners help care for wounded or sick wildlife, including hawks, coyotes and raccoons.

“You dedicate yourself to the cat. You tend to it, keep an eye on it, give it love.”

Denys Carmona Rojas, prisoner

Connecting prisoners and dogs has repeatedly been shown to lead to “a decrease in recidivism, improved empathy, improved social skills and a safer and more positive relationship between inmates and prison officials,” said Beatriz Villafaina-Dominguez, a researcher in Spain who reviewed 20 separate studies of such programs.

Dogs have been the most common animal used by prisons, followed by horses, and in most programs, animals are brought to the prisoners, or vice versa. In Chile, however, the prisoners developed an organic connection to the stray cats who live alongside them.

Yet there was a time when the relationship was not so positive. A decade ago, the cat population was expanding uncontrolled and many cats were getting sick, including developing a contagious infection that left some cats blind. The situation “even stressed out the inmates themselves,” said Carla Contreras Sandoval, a prison social worker with two cat tattoos.

So in 2016, prison officials finally allowed volunteers to come care for the cats. A Chilean organisation called the Felinnos Foundation has since worked with Humane Society International to systematically collect all of the cats to treat, spay and neuter them. They have now reached nearly every one.

The program’s success has been partly thanks to the prisoners, Sandoval said. The prisoners collect cats that need care and bring them to the volunteers.

On a recent day, four women lugged cat carriers onto the prison grounds, on the hunt for a number of felines, including Lucky, Aquila, Dropon and her six new kittens, and Nunez’s cat, Ugly.

The courtyard was chaotic, packed for a prisoner soccer match, but prisoners politely made way for the women.

Quickly, men cradling cats in tattooed arms came bounding down stairs along the courtyard, handing animals through prison bars to the volunteers. In one stop, Denys Carmona Rojas, 57, a prisoner serving eight years on gun charges, doted on a litter of kittens in a box. He said he had helped raise many kittens in his cell, recounting one case in which he fed special milk to a litter after the mother died during birth.

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“You dedicate yourself to the cat. You tend to it, keep an eye on it, give it love,” he said, smiling to show off missing front teeth. “The feeling that comes out of that – there’s nothing bad about it, man.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.