How to make a jailbird cry like a baby? Take away his puppy

TEXAN justice is tough. Maybe it’s simply that, in a state nearly three times bigger than Britain, they’ve got plenty of room for prisons, but it seems everything from smoking indoors to parking on a yellow line carries a hefty jail term. One character on Me And My Guide

Dog (ITV) was serving a 20-month sentence just for taking a trip without informing his parole officer first. In the UK, muggers often get less than that.

Whether you think the law courts of the Deep South are unduly harsh or plain- darn- tootin’ common sensical, they’ve got one thing right about Texas jails. Prisoners convicted of non-violent crimes have the privilege of puppy-walking guide dogs for the blind.

It makes perfect sense. Every young guide dog must spend its first year doing basic training, learning to obey basic commands.

Even the brightest labradors and retrievers, the breeds typically picked to be the surrogate eyes of their blind owners, are too boisterous and excitable to be trusted during their early months.

But looking after a young dog takes time and energy, and is emotionally demanding. Finding people willing to commit many hours a day to puppy-walking is not easy . . . unless, of course, you run a prison.

In Britain, the work usually falls to pensioners, often people who have always had dogs but fear the responsibility of taking on another for its whole lifetime. A guide puppy seems a good compromise; they’ll keep it for just a year.

But as this lively show explained, there are a couple of problems with that approach. Firstly, 12 months is more than long enough to fall utterly in love with a dog — and it’s heartbreaking to hand it back. ‘I feel like Cruella de Vil,’ admitted the bloke whose job it was to drive round the country, repossessing puppies that had completed their first year.

Secondly, adolescent labs are like kangaroos on caffeine. They should be kept far away from anything breakable, and that includes the frail and elderly.

Widower Colin was tackling his first guide puppy, after caring for his wife during her long illness. The dog, he found, was harder work: ‘At least my wife never bit me,’ he joked.

Poor Colin was bereft when his dog was taken away, for more rigorous training. He couldn’t even bring himself to say goodbye — a special bond had formed, one that only dog-owners can understand.

Parting isn’t any easier for the Texan jailbirds. One criminal wept at the prison gates when he was released, because he couldn’t take his canine student with him. He’s got an easy answer, though: park on a yellow line, and he’ll soon be back inside. The hospital documentary An Hour To Save Your Life (BBC2) ought to have pulled just as vigorously at the heartstrings. Instead, this was a clinical and unemotional look at the work of surgeons on maternity wards — informative but unengaging.

The doctors can’t afford to see their newborn patients the way parents do, as bundles of precious wonder. Give in to sentiment and they could never do their work. As medics operated on one new infant for a ruptured diaphragm, and fought to inflate the lungs of another born ten weeks premature, the footage was almost unwatchable.

These procedures are the babies’ only chance of life — but they still look ruthlessly brutal, and it was difficult not to recoil.

The premise of the series is that, when a medical crisis occurs, the first 60 minutes are the most important — what doctors call the Golden Hour. That must be true where road accidents and heart attacks are concerned, but not on labour wards.

Both those babies, Alyssia and Evelyn, had been monitored in the womb for months. Their conditions were serious but not unexpected. And the Golden Hour took up barely half the programme: after that, it moved on to the weeks of post-natal care that both girls required.

The footage was manipulated too much to fit the producers’ format, and their stories suffered as a result.