The dog was removed from Magilligan Prison following a “callous and calculated external threat”
The handling of a support dog for prisoners has been described as “amateurish” by a former leading PSNI officer who recently became a politician.
Jon Burrows, a former PSNI Area Commander who is now an MLA with the UUP, made the comment after a dog was removed from Magilligan Prison in Co Derry following what the prison service has described as a “threat”.
The Northern Ireland Prison Service, meanwhile, has said the dog – named Bailey – was “perfectly happy and well looked after”.
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A protest was held outside Magilligan Prison on Monday, with members and supporters of the local Causeway Coast Dog Rescue organisation taking part in a show of concern for the animal.
Mr Burrows, speaking to BBC Radio Foyle on Tuesday morning, said it had been looked after by members of staff at the prison who were “untrained”.
“I’ve established from the Minister that Bailey was in the prison without a trained handler,” he said. “And managed by staff who simply were untrained and on a kind of goodwill basis would pass the dog between themselves. And then, second of all, that the dog never went home, that it lived in the prison wing. Now that’s what I’ve established as fact.”
He continued: “You’ve put a dog that is a pet dog in a very high risk environment in a prison, surrounded by people who are convicted criminals. Now whilst there’s a role for rehabilitation, of course there are going to be added risks there. And what, in my view, has happened here is the prison service have done this in a very amateurish way.
“They’ve put a pet dog at risk. And let me just explain that further because I’ve worked with service dogs a long time in my previous role. You will have dogs who are service dogs, who know their boundaries.
“So for example, you might have a dog who’s hyper vigilant at work in the police or the prison service or some other service, but then when it goes home, it’ll sleep through a thunderstorm because it knows when it’s off duty and on duty.
“This dog didn’t because it was always at work, and I heard firsthand from prison officers, two or three told me exactly the same story – that Bailey was distressed at night time, particularly when alarms sounded, because if there was a self-harm incident in the prison or there was a fight broke out on a wing, alarms go off, there’s noise, there’s prison officers running about that really worried the dog. It wasn’t normalised to that kind of environment.”
He added: “I’m glad the dog is out.”
Mr Burrows is now calling for a review to be carried out, saying: “We now need to make sure that scheme is paused, that proper reviews take place. I’ve called for an independent review, and I ask the Justice Minister to conduct it to find out what happened here, what lessons have we learned, and make sure that we don’t make these kinds of mistakes again.”
A Prison Service spokesperson said: “A perfectly happy and well looked after dog at Magilligan Prison has had to be moved after the Police Service of Northern Ireland made us aware of a callous and calculated external threat to say that Bailey was going to be harmed in an attempt to embarrass the governor.”
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