Joint Zoo - Prison Program Announced

TAMPA – Stanley “Stosh” Treed-Kohn, director of the Lowry Zoo in Tampa and Hillsborough County Sheriff Huckabee Lopez have announced a joint exhibition for their respective facilities.  “The Lowry Zoo will have a small number of cages in which prisoners will be housed and exhibited as part of the primate section of the zoo,” Treed-Kohn said.  “Sheriff Lopez will furnish trustees for the exhibit, many of whom have volunteered to be in the zoo because it will be time away from the boring day-to-day activity of living life in prison.  They will be getting some sunshine and get to see a lot of people, some of whom might offer them candy or other foods that can be purchased at the zoo, just like zoo-goers buy food to feed the giraffes.”

Inmate Volunteers

Meerkats Going to Prison

In return for supplying prisoners for the new exhibit, the Lowry Zoo will loan the prison some of its excess animals.  “We have a shit load of turtles and more meerkats than we need, and it will probably improve the moral of the prisoners to have something different to look at in their exercise yard”, said Treed-Kohn.  “The zoo was going to loan us some monkeys also, but it might be hard to tell them apart from some of the inmates, so I took a pass on that offer, said Sheriff Lopez.”

The exchange program will start in early April when the evening temperatures are warm enough for the visiting prisoners to stay in their cages overnight.  The zoo is modifying some currently empty exhibit cages to provide some minimal privacy at times “when nature calls”.

This zoo-prison program is thought to be the first of its kind in the nation, although a similar program between the National Zoo in Washington and Guantanamo Bay facility was considered during the Bush administration, but rejected because of Republican opposition to bringing Muslims into the continental United States.