Horse whisperer tames wild hearts in Florence

Randy Helm was born to be a cowboy, and not just because he cuts a classic profile in leather boots and a ten-gallon hat.

A fourth-generation Arizonan, Helm, 62, grew up on ranches, tending crops and cattle and training horses. There was a stint in the Air Force and a job in law enforcement. In 1993, he trained his first wild horse.

The 5-year-old mare proved an enticing challenge, and the learning curve was steep. The process, Helm said, is trickier, more delicate than with other horses. They spook easily, and their fight-or-flight impulse can have a hair trigger.

Helm was hooked.

Once you figure out how to communicate with a wild horse, Helm said, it’s amazing how willing the herd animal is to do what you want.

Given his background and animal intuition, that Helm turned out to be a world-class horse whisperer seems obvious.

Taming wild spirits

Less obvious is Brian Tierce, a rough-looking man with a missing front tooth in prison for aggravated assault. Or Dashonte Abdul Al-Wakil, who has been locked up for 18 years for second-degree murder and drug violations.

“I never even had a puppy,” Al-Wakil said.

But working with Helm has changed that. Tierce and Al-Wakil are two of the approximately 30 inmates currently participating in the Wild Horse Inmate Program at the state prison in Florence.

It’s a collaboration between the Arizona Department of Corrections and the Bureau of Land Management, which rounds up wild horses to ensure the health and sustainability of Arizona’s public rangelands. Some of those captured horses are taken to the program holding facility, where Helm and his crew of horse trainers, clad in bright prison orange, work to gentle the wild animals.

WHIP was conceived as an inmate work program, not an equine therapy program. The Bureau of Land Management has a lot of horses, and Florence prison has a lot of idle prisoners in need of a task.

Around 150 horses are adopted each year from the program. Many of them go to the U.S. Border Patrol; the trained trail horses make it easier for officers to traverse the difficult terrain along the Arizona-Mexico border.

Though the program isn’t therapeutic by design, it’s proving to be by function. So far, among the 50 or so inmates who have gone through the program and been released from prison since 2012, there has been a zero percent recidivism rate. That is far below the national recidivism rate; according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, about two-thirds of released prisoners are rearrested within three years.

'Why can't we let these inmates prove themselves?'

Many of the skills prisoners pick up are practical. Helm says several men who have been released from prison are working with horses on the outside. There is also the value of seeing a project through to completion, something many of the men have never done.

“There’s a process to get there and you can’t take short cuts,” Helm said of training wild horses. “A lot of these guys are in prison because they circumvent the process. I’ve had guys figure that out on their own, they say, 'I never saw anything through to that amazing, fulfilling feeling when you accomplish something that you’ve worked towards.' ”

There are more intangible benefits, too.

“What I learn from my horses is patience, love and caring, and trust,” said Al-Wakil, who sees similarities between himself and the horses he helps to tame. “When these horses first come in, their problem is trust. When I first come into prison, that was my problem.”

Helm is quick to acknowledge that the low recidivism rate, like the program, is young. “You kind of hold your breath, because people are people,” he said. But he is doing his best to keep the recidivism rate as low as possible, making himself available to the men who go through the program even after they’ve served their time.

“We ask a horse to yield one thing at a time, not be rideable immediately, but to be better every day,” Helm said. “We let these horses prove themselves; why can’t we let these inmates prove themselves as well?”

Reach the reporter at barbara.vandenburgh@arizonarepublic.com, 602-444-8371 or on Twitter,@BabsVan.