Corrections officers have been brutally attacked by their own patrol dogs. Officials say the risk is worth it.

As an incident report recounted, she'd been moving an attack-trained patrol dog between kennels in an Arizona State Prison Complex just outside Tucson, Arizona, when the dog clamped down on her left hand.

In Iowa, an attack-trained patrol dog named Maverick bit a corrections officer on the right buttock in May 2020 while responding to a fight at the state penitentiary.

The following September, a patrol dog named Oscar attacked Ryan Edwards, a Virginia Department of Corrections canine-officer trainee, during obedience training. The dog bit both of Edwards' forearms and his right hand, according to an incident report; he was immediately transported to a nearby medical clinic for treatment.

Insider identified at least eight state prison systems that have in recent years deployed dogs to attack people in state custody or as a show of force. The departments of corrections that deploy these dogs say the animals make prison facilities safer for corrections officers and prison staff members. Some departments argue that the presence of the dogs alone — their barking and snarling — is so intimidating that it deters many violent incidents before they take place. When employed as a use of force, prison administrators say, the dogs are a manpower multiplier that replace corrections officers in dangerous situations where they'd risk injury — like breaking up a violent fight or forcibly removing someone from a cell, a tactic known as a "cell extraction."

Records obtained by Insider reveal that from 2017 to 2022, patrol dogs employed by state prisons were commanded to attack incarcerated people at least 295 times. The dogs also went rogue and bit corrections officers or other prison staff members at least 13 times: three times in Iowa, four in Arizona, and six times in Virginia. The bites were sometimes severe, requiring emergency medical attention, even surgery.

In 2018, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined the Iowa Department of Corrections $5,000 for dangerous working conditions including the use of patrol dogs, which had indiscriminately bitten prisoners, corrections officers, and canine handlers. In an unredacted OSHA report obtained by Insider through a public-records request, the OSHA inspector found that the Iowa prison system had failed to provide sufficient time for training the dogs; as a consequence, the report said, "the likelihood of officer injury from security animals is significantly increased."

The labor union representing Iowa corrections employees did not respond to Insider's requests for an interview about the threat that patrol dogs present to workplace safety. Nor did the Virginia labor union that represents corrections officers, including canine handlers.

Carlos Garcia is the executive director of the Arizona Correctional Peace Officers Association, the union that represents corrections officers. He's also a former canine officer in the Arizona prison system, and he agreed to review Insider's findings. He noted that nearly all of the recent bites on staffers in Arizona occurred in the dog kennels that employ people, like Velazquez, without specialized canine training. She was cleaning the dog kennels when a dog bit her hand so severely that she required emergency surgery.

He said accidental bites incurred in routine training or during the chaos of a cell extraction were to be expected.

"A dog is a loaded pistol," Garcia said.

Read more of Insider's coverage of prison dogs:

The secret terror inside US prisons
Belgian Malinois are used to attack and terrify prisoners. I volunteered to let one bite me.

Garcia said one of his dogs — an animal named Duco — bit him many times during training before becoming compliant. But some dogs, even after weeks of mandatory training, can still become indiscriminately aggressive, Garcia said. If a dog went "rogue" and routinely bit handlers or other staff, it's likely the dog would need to be euthanized, he said.

Kathleen Dennehy, a corrections consultant who previously served as corrections commissioner for Massachusetts, said that despite the documented risk attack-trained dogs pose to staff and prisoner safety, some rank-and-file officers and the unions representing them were reluctant to give up any use-of-force options. She said many prison administrators felt the same way.

Yet the toll on corrections officers can be extreme, particularly in Virginia, which uses the dogs more heavily than any other state. Matthew Johnson, a former canine officer at Wallens Ridge State Prison in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, told Insider that his last dog bit his forearm severely, leaving a 4-inch gash that required stitches.

Records show that another dog, a 93-pound German shepherd called Oscar, bit at least two canine officers in 2021 and 2022. He was the dog who bit Ryan Edwards on both forearms and the right hand during training. Seven months later, according to an internal incident report, he bit another canine officer's hand, causing "serious injury," as the officer was trying to move Oscar to a new kennel.

Oscar was eventually labeled by a training official as a "very concerning liability" and euthanized.

Getting bit by your own patrol dog is an expected — even routine — part of being a prison canine officer, Johnson told Insider.

But he still describes it as "the best job I ever had."

In Virginia prisons, patrol dogs and their handlers are expected to arrive first on the scene to any incident that may require force, such as a violent fight, and assume command, according to Johnson and two other former department employees. It's a high-pressure and high-risk mandate that puts canine handlers and their dogs at the front lines of some of the most violent episodes in Virginia's high-security prisons.

Insider spoke with two former Virginia canine handlers, Johnson and Daniel Clinton, as well as Brian Mitchell, a former Red Onion corrections officer who went on to become a sergeant, lieutenant, and investigator at Keen Mountain Correctional Center, a high-security prison in western Virginia. All three said the department's overdependence on dogs could endanger staff members. "The challenge is, in the facilities, especially in the stairwells, it's a very tight place," Mitchell said. "Everybody's packed in there. The chances of someone getting bit are really high."

Mitchell said he investigated an incident at Keen Mountain in which a canine officer did not have proper control over his dog as they came through a door and surprised a mental-health counselor just on the other side. The dog bit the counselor on her thigh. When Mitchell went to take photos for the internal investigation, he found a pool of blood on the boulevard between buildings.

"It was a pretty bad bite," Mitchell said.

Officers responding to potentially dangerous situations risk more than just a bite when relying on a patrol dog. The requirement that handlers respond to violent incidents first puts them at heightened risk, the former staffers said, because if the dog fails to stop the violence, their handler is stuck defending themselves alone while tethered to the animal.

Johnson said he was once caught responding to a fight without backup when his dog, Fuga, failed to effectively bite the prisoners involved. Fuga had previously cracked or lost all four of his canine teeth, but this was the first time he'd failed to latch on. Johnson said he was left to fight the prisoners alone, one-handed, while gripping Fuga's lead. Johnson said that immediately afterward, he requested a new dog and retired Fuga.

In January 2021, an internal log report documents that a group of incarcerated people stabbed a sergeant at Sussex I State Prison and then attacked the responding canine officer. A VADOC press release issued the next day said the dog was also injured, stabbed multiple times. The dog required emergency surgery but survived.

The constant vigilance the canine-officer role demands took a toll on Clinton, who was a canine handler for 12 years at Sussex I State Prison. His wife has told him he still shouts canine commands in his sleep, he said, nearly three years after he left the department.

Mitchell, the former investigator, said that just witnessing a dog attack could be traumatizing for corrections officers. "The screaming, the fighting, the blood," Mitchell said. "It's just not something you forget."

The vast majority of state systems do not use dogs even in high-security prisons — in some cases because of the extreme risk of harm. A representative for the Arkansas Department of Corrections told Insider that the department had one patrol dog in 2012 but officers decided the dog was incapable of "discernment" and were worried he would attack indiscriminately. The program was scrapped not long after it started.

Other prison administrators have consciously decided to shoulder that risk. In a 2017 email obtained by Insider, the administrator of a Virginia patrol-dog program acknowledged concerns following an accidental patrol-dog bite there. Using dogs in the stairways, the administrator wrote, put staff members and prisoners at risk of unnecessary contact, given the close proximity to the animals.

The administration," the email concluded, "has indicated that the security of the institutions are far more important than the risks of these incidents."