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They do things that neither mere humans nor high technology can: They track, and find, fugitives and lost children, they sniff out crime evidence, they locate corpses, they protect law enforcement officers. Yet they get little credit.

Russ Kelley, from Naples, takes a couple of them to and from his job every workday. And they're not even his.
The K-9s belong to the state.

(l-r): Tom Hanrahan, Boomer, Tom's boys & Russell Kelly

A veteran of 20 years in corrections, Kelley is a Corrections Officer Supervisor and K-9 Commander at Maine Correctional Center in Windham. With considerable help from Corrections Officers/K-9 handlers Tom Hanrahan and Steve Lacourse, he oversees three fully trained K-9s. Kelley's K-9 duty is an adjunct to his primary job of supervising guards at the center and it entails considerable unpaid time. "If I got paid for all the hours I put in it would knock the program right out of the water," he says. Besides handling his "own" dogs, Kelley is a certified canine trainer and evaluator. He did not participate in the most recent Basic Patrol Canine School program run by the Maine State Police at Pineland Center in Pownal, but he did take part in its June 12 graduation ceremony for ten newly certified canine teams. While Kelley is a Maine Department of Corrections (DOC) officer, he is quick to give Maine State Police the credit for the K-9 training program. He says, "I've been trained by the Maine State Police and I assist in their training program, but the state police run the show. It's their school. They took us under their wing from square one.

"State police officers Paul Gallagher, a Master Trainer who's retired now, Cliff Sibley, and current Principle Trainer Spec. Donald Pomelow have trained all the Maine Correctional Center's K-9s and are the top K-9 trainers in the state."

Of the ten recent Pineland graduate canine teams, four were from the state police, two from sheriffs' departments (Cumberland and Androscoggin), one from Maine Correctional Center, two from municipal police departments (Bath and Cumberland), and one from the warden service. The state police also train out-of-state teams, even a few from Canada.

Four of this graduating class' dogs are shepherds, six are Belgian malinois' (pronounced MAL-in-wah). (The malinois breed will be discussed in part II, next week.) All K-9 candidates are donated to the state.

A canine patrol training program involves 16 weeks of intensive training and those handlers who can, commute. But some, the warden from Aroostook County in the recent class, for example, stay at the training center.

Tom Hanrahan, a Windham resident, and his K-9, Boomer, made up Windham Correctional Center's recently graduated K-9 team. They had previously completed 5 weeks of drug training last fall and Hanrahan says, "The training has been fantastic. Now he (Boomer) is patrol trained, so he's got almost 800 hours of training under his belt just in this fiscal year. This training was tracking, article searches, scouting, officer protection he'll bite on command. Whatever I want him to do, he'll do for me."

Bite on command? When it was pointed out that Boomer outwardly appeared to be a friendly, well-behaved pet, Hanrahan quickly added, "He'll only bite when I say to."

State Police Lieutenant in charge of training, Charles Howe, in his speech at the graduation said, "The graduating dogs will be placed into service almost immediately, performing the duties they've been trained for. The last canine class that graduated, on the day of graduation, one of the graduates was involved in a major incident with the canine. Not a day goes by that these canines are not pressed into some type of service, whether it be tracking a wanted fugitive, or tracking a victim of Alzheimer's."

As if to prove his point, although they did not involve new graduates, news reports within days of the graduation were illustrative: On June 18, the Portland Press Herald reported the arrest of "a Kezar Falls man and two teen-agers after they allegedly broke into several cars..." in Scarborough. "(Scarborough) Officer Tom Chard and his police dog, Jak, tracked the second teen-ager to a tree he had climbed..."

Three days later, the Maine Sunday Telegram reported that two Maryland sisters, ages 11 and 14, became lost in the woods of Lyman. "York County sheriff's deputies, state police, the Maine Warden Service and members of the county's search and rescue team were mobilized for a major search when Deke (a K-9) and his handler (Maine State Police) Trooper Jerome Carr, followed the trail about a mile and a half into the woods they found the girls huddled together unharmed."

Russ Kelley with his six year old Belgian malinois, Jake, perform those kinds of duties when called upon but, along with Tom Hanrahan and Boomer, and Steve LaCourse with Katie, they are primarily a prison K-9 team.

Kelley remembers when officials at Windham Correctional Center decided to add canines to prison security. "Many, many escapes had taken place in Windham prior to '86, costing the state over $200,000 per year," he says. "In an attempt to curb the expense and man-hours, they decided to get canines. In 1986 Chief of Security at Windham, Paul Magnusson (now deceased) called me into his office. He'd done a lot of hunting with dogs, and so had I coon hunting and so forth. He knew I was kind of a dog person. The first one I had was Renegade, a large German shepherd."

Along with another dog and handler, Russ Kelley and Renegade went through a 16 week state police patrol dog school in Alfred. "We all completed the training and became certified. And from 1986 on, escapes dropped dramatically.

"It (the presence of K-9s) benefits everybody. It prevents escapes, it prevents the cost of people going out on overtime. The dogs don't call in sick, you don't have to pay them a lot, and they are there when you need them."

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