Nevada inmates help mustangs achieve ‘parole’

There’s a term in the horse world known as ″gentling.″ It refers to working with a wild horse until it becomes responsive to a trainer’s commands, meaning that it no longer wants to kick you in the face. When handled properly, the horse even bonds with its trainer. Gentling happens every day at the Silver State Industries ranch in Carson City, Nevada, a 1,100-acre property in the vast, harsh high desert south of Reno. As many as 2,000 wild horses are corralled there at any time; a good number are trained for adoption. The ranch is part of the Northern Nevada Correctional Center, a medium-security prison that also houses minimum-security inmates. Twelve to 15 inmates, most of whom have little or no experience with horses, work under the instruction of a cowboy named Hank Curry, who teaches the inmates to do the gentling. Curry, 67, no longer sees his job as strictly horse trainer, as he once did. ″I’m a counselor, a teacher, a horse trainer,” he said. “You establish pride in the guy and pride in his job, he’s going to be a lot more successful when he gets out of here.″ Most of the inmates he works with are nonviolent offenders, with sentences of two years or less, and they signed up for the job. Everyone involved in the program recognizes the symbolism: the way the horses and the inmates are both penned up and how, through the training process, they rehabilitate one another. That aspect of the program is what appealed to Ryan Shorosky, a photographer who spent a week in spring documenting what he called ″the beautiful parallel between the inmates and the horses, using each other to get to that next point.″ Wearing dusty Levi’s, work boots and hand-me-down chaps, the inmates clean stalls and repair gear. They water and feed the horses and undertake the slow process of earning a wild animal’s trust. The work, done in blazing heat, is dirty and bruising. The men enjoy the sense of freedom, the fresh air and the camaraderie that develops among them and with the mustangs...more