On Thursday in Part 3 of this excerpt from the new book Equine ER, Marching Orders, the stoic Thoroughbred with the big heart, ran into trouble in the operating room. Today, we look further at the prison farm program where an inmate’s life was transformed by Marching Orders.

From the outside, Blackburn Correctional Complex looks like a former boy’s school Ð old-fashioned brick buildings with tall windows curved at the top Ð but it has always been a prison. The prison farm program is on 100 acres at the back end of the property. Headquarters is a converted dairy barn. It is white with green shutters, an octagonal window in the middle, and old-fashioned lanterns on either side. It looks like Anne of Green Gables mucks out the stalls inside, not men who have been convicted for dealing and selling drugs, DUIs with manslaughter, burglary, or writing illegal OxyContin prescriptions.

Horses graze in paddocks of the Blackburn prison farm program