Puppies in Prison
Woman’s best friend is freeing lives outside—and inside—prison written by Shirley Hancock | photography by Shauna Intelisano AMY DUARTE’S FREEDOM is rooted in Oregon’s postcard landscapes. As a child, collecting bugs in the high desert. As a snowboard instructor, guiding young shredders down a volcano. As a wildland firefighter, lugging 40 pounds of gear up a mountain. But one violent, summer night in 2011, Duarte’s freedom shrank to a 6-by-12-foot cell. Arrested for domestic violence, she claimed it was in self-defense that she grabbed a lamp and swung. Her sentence—almost six years in Oregon’s “big house” for women, Coffee Creek Correctional Facility. “I was like a zombie. An empty shell, with no hope,” Duarte said. “Hearing that cell door shut—that was the most traumatizing moment of my life.” Two years later hope arrived, in a wiggly pup named Sonic. Duarte is among sixty-four Oregon women who, since 1995, have…
