In Prisons Across Ohio, These Inmates Are Finding Meaning by Saving Orphaned and Injured Animals

The Ohio Wildlife Center’s hospital sends critters to five facilities for care before eventual release

Olivia Young

September 19, 2025

Hidden behind brick walls and barbed-wire fences on the outskirts of a small Ohio town, an aviary no bigger than a single-car garage contains rows of wall-to-wall birdcages separated by species—swallows, blue jays, robins, cardinals and finches. A gravel-bottom enclosure holds ducklings. Cages outside the aviary house small mammals. The aviary has a narrow duck pond in the back and a plywood square painted with the portrait of a coyote hanging on the front door. Inside, 71-year-old Willie H. uses plastic tweezers to feed moistened dog food pellets to juvenile robins through the bars of their cage. Like every day, he does this with his pet cockatiel, Bird, on his shoulder.

The makeshift aviary he’s spent the past 20 years working in is within the confines of the Marion Correctional Institution, where he’s serving a potential life sentence. The Ohio Wildlife Center has been sending injured and orphaned wildlife to Marion for rehabilitation since the 1990s. According to Brittany Jordan, the center’s wildlife rehabilitation operational director, these behind-bars rehab centers are now in five prisons across the state, and more institutions are joining the program as a way to help both the inmates and the animals.

Willie has been incarcerated for murder for a half-century, since he was 21. (Prisoners’ full names were not used for this article to protect the incarcerated individuals and those affected by their crimes.) He was one of the first inmates to participate in the program, which has rehabilitated and released thousands of animals that required extra care after being treated at the Ohio Wildlife Center’s hospital in Columbus. The inmates volunteer as caretakers and learn how to handle, feed and administer medication to a wide range of species—from barn swallows to opossums. They’re taught how to know when a bird is full by how rounded its crop is, and how to gently massage an opossum kit’s abdomen to stimulate digestion. In the wild, many newborn mammals don’t even urinate or defecate without the help of their mothers, so the inmates play the essential role of being stand-in parents.

Willie has perfected the task of tube-feeding rabbits and opossums over decades of practice. If the tube goes down their windpipes, they’ll aspirate, so he is gentle and careful not to push it too far into their tiny bodies. In the early days of the Prison Program, Willie says, he was the “go-to guy.” Educators from the Ohio Wildlife Center would provide him with the training and materials, and he would walk around to the other volunteers’ cells spreading the word on how to keep the animals alive. Today, Marion and the other institutions have robust training programs overseen by designated prison employees. The inmates regularly take courses to hone their skills, and because they don’t have the internet as a resource, their supervisors serve as Ohio Wildlife Center liaisons to answer questions.

Data from the center shows that more than 60 incarcerated volunteers across the five prisons now participate in the program, and 52 of them are based at Marion, the only facility that takes birds. Each volunteer has a day job in maintenance, laundry or another department of the prison and dedicates hours of their time to the program daily. The data shows that between January and August 2025, Marion had received 284 animals and released 186 of them on the 1,032 acres of land the prison sits on, which contains several groves and ponds. Scotty Fuqua, a correctional officer and the program coordinator, says that eventually, he hopes to be able to take in 1,000 animals a year at Marion.

According to admissions data from 2025, the Ohio Wildlife Center’s hospital treated some 9,000 animals from almost 200 species throughout the year. They’re brought in for a multitude of reasons including pet attacks, car accidents and window strikes. The animals that recover at the hospital and require further care before being released go to home care volunteers throughout the state. Jordan says around 70 percent of them are incarcerated. She thinks prisons have all the makings of an ideal environment for recovering wildlife, partly because no children or domesticated animals are around. Rabbits are especially sensitive to sound; just hearing a dog barking can cause them to die from stress. To keep the animals wild, they shouldn’t be talked to, touched or cuddled like pets. “And, most importantly,” Jordan says, “they need time.”

Some of the young songbirds that pass through the hospital require feedings every 15 minutes. And the mammals often need to be fed every few hours, even through the night. The inmates sometimes end up sharing their cells with cages of animals. At Mansfield’s Richland Correctional Institution, a prison that houses minimum- and medium-security inmates, volunteers have 24-hour access to a room in their dorm where squirrels, opossums and rabbits are kept.

Because they spend so much time with the animals—sometimes up to eight hours a day—the inmates are quick to notice and respond to issues. In 2022, Richland volunteers saw that infant opossums being treated together were losing hair, developing ulcers and dying off. Thanks to their training, the inmates immediately recognized the symptoms as signs of metabolic bone disease. “The femur heads weren’t forming,” says David Donahue, the Ohio Wildlife Center’s development and communications manager. The opossums’ bones weren’t growing properly due to a lack of calcium. The team at Richland and the Ohio Wildlife Center suspected that the brand of milk replacement they were using had changed its formula. So, the inmates experimented with adding calcium to the formula, and it worked. They haven’t seen another case of metabolic bone disease since.

While the Prison Program benefits wildlife and conservation in Ohio, it also rewards inmates with new skills, routine and purpose as they serve time for their crimes. “The effect that this program has on the offenders here is quite remarkable,” says Fuqua. “The men who participate in this program get a chance to care for something other than themselves, and you can see the changes in their behavior. They tend to stay out of trouble, away from substance abuse, and have an increased interest to learn more about the animals they care for.”

As a former correctional psychologist, Tristin Engels saw firsthand how caring for animals in prison can affect inmates. She worked with prisoners in a California program that trained dogs to help veterans with PTSD. “Programs like this teach practical life skills like goal setting, problem solving, time management and overall responsibility, all of which are critical for acclimating back into society,” she says. “It also gives them more vocational skills, which can improve their employment opportunities. More importantly, it also boosts self-worth and confidence, which can really help break the cycle of recidivism.”

Tierre M., 49, is on his 24th year of an 18-year-to-life sentence for murder. He’s been in the Prison Program at Marion for two years and says it’s been the best two years of his life. “Some of these birds coming in, it crushes you to see them,” he says. “Then, to see [one] getting stronger and the strength coming back in it, the life coming back in it, it’s awesome.” When a bird is finally ready to be released, he thinks, “Man, he really made it.”

Inmates are required to keep a clean record in prison to care for the animals, and many agree it’s an incentive to stay out of trouble. Willie recalls a memory from years ago, when a volunteer got into an argument with the warden and had 12 red squirrels taken from his cell at 2 a.m. They ended up with Willie. He knows that if he were to break the rules or wind up in a similar dispute, he would not only lose his Prison Program privileges but also his beloved Bird, and he won’t risk it.

With the help of volunteers in prison, the Ohio Wildlife Center rehabilitates and releases almost 2,000 animals every year, according to annual reports, and that number is likely to grow. While annual wildlife admissions continue to rise due to increased human-wildlife conflict, climate change and more, the Ohio Wildlife Center has gotten more prisons interested in rehabilitation. Both London Correctional Institution and the Ohio Reformatory for Women took in their first batch of animals this past June. And as the volunteers become eligible for parole, the center aims to keep them involved. Willie says he can see himself volunteering after prison—or even pursuing a job in wildlife rehabilitation. “I actually think it’s fun,” he says. “Doing it and other people seeing it [might make them] want to help, too.”