Shane Hawkins is a successful entrepreneur, but he got there on the hardest pathway.
“Well, I didn’t know any better back then, and I was just trying to get through life the best I could,” Hawkins said while sitting in the middle of a brightly painted room where a wall mural of dog pictures and the musky smell of dogs hangs in the air.
He was a young man growing up wild an hour north Atlanta in Buford, Georgia, doing all the things that would eventually land him in the Gwinnett County jail waiting to begin a 15-year sentence for Driving Under the Influence – Serious Injury by Vehicle in 2014.
“They threw the book at me, and I needed it too,” he admits.
He was caught in a vicious cycle and it was going to take something big to straighten him out.
Two things happened to him in jail that changed the course of his life.
First, he met Mac at an AA Meeting.
“This guy named Mac walks in and he says, ‘When I was a kid, I watched my stepfather murder my mother and he would always molest me and rape me,'” Hawkins remembers. “This man went through the craziest thing, and yet, he stands there in front of a whole crowd of people with peace and freedom like nothing happened to him.”
Hawkins wanted to experience that peace and freedom too. So he started seeking ways to change how he thought and felt about himself and others – ultimately finding his Christian faith.
And then he was chosen to participate in Operation Second Chance, also known as the Gwinnett Jail Dog Program.
This was a partnership between the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office and the Society of Humane Friends of Georgia. The initiative sought to rescue shelter dogs, train them for adoption while also rehabilitating inmates. From 2010 until ending
the program in 2023, the inmates trained and placed more than 1,000 dogs with families, according to the Society of Humane Friends of Georgia’s summary of the program.
“It was a good thing,” Hawkins says. “It gave us the ability to work and train with dogs while we were in there (jail).”
This was a skill he already suspected he possessed.
He remembers this one story.
“My neighbor had a pit bull that was so aggressive,” he recalls. “She’d run the fence and try to attack people. There was one day when I was like, you know what, I’m just going to sit at the end of this leash, and she’s going to bark at me all day long to get so tired that maybe I can reach over and pet him.”
It worked.
Now he was in a program where he could spend 24 hours a day with a violent dog, working to decrease aggression and prepare for eventual adoption.
This is where Hawkins’ character really began to come alive.
The program’s leadership provided training and resources to the inmates to help them acquire additional dog training skills.
In fact, he became known in the program as the person who could rehabilitate the worst-behaved dogs.
Hawkins took that training and experience working with dogs and wrote his first book.
“He would write probably 10-12 (pages) front and back on notebook paper and mail them to me,” said Judith Vilson, Hawkins’ mother. “When I received them, I’d start typing. His 10-12 pages would be maybe three pages of typed words.”
At night Hawkins hand wrote chapters of his 70-page book and put them in the mail to his mother who prepared them for publication on Amazon.
“Troubled to Trained: All dogs need a leader they can trust” was published November 2017 and has sold more than 1,000 copies. Sonia, his favorite dog while in the program, is on the cover. The title suggests the theme of his own life.
But Program administrators also recognized Hawkins had leadership qualities.
“I became the head trainer of the program,” Hawkins says, explaining he was responsible for managing and helping 30 inmates working with dogs in the jail. He proudly states he helped 327 dogs get adopted during his time in the program.
Not everyone serving time in prison experiences personal growth like this.
“I wanted it more than anybody,” he said. “I was always doing extra work, reading extra books, going over my past, like really diving into it.”
A New Chapter
All that hard work paid off. He was paroled after serving six years, two months and 1 week of his 15-year sentence – three years in County Jail and another three in prison.
With a new chance at life, Hawkins (now 38 years old) knew he had to make some good choices.
First, he recognized he needed to surround himself with good people. Then he knew he had to find a way to make good money while trying to overcome significant challenges.
So he moved in with his mother in Walland, who owns a cabin next door to Crikett Lane Kennels.
“I had to walk everywhere when I first got home,” he recalled. No car. No license. A felony record and parole fees to pay until he completes parole in 2037.
Although he had a small farm job making $15 an hour, he started doing side gigs as a dog trainer to keep up with finances.
While sitting on his mother’s back porch, he realized that to have the flexible schedule he needed to abide by his parole rules and to make enough money to support himself and pay his fees, he needed something better.
Hawkins decided to focus all his energy on building a dog training business.
“The whole thing was challenging,” he admits. Business license. Marketing materials. Website. Insurance. Facilities. Advertising. Accounting.
Without transportation, these details were much harder.
But one piece of luck helped a lot. His mother’s cabin was right next door to Crikett Lane Kennels where Jennifer and Scott Hicks offer dog boarding services and Misty Toler provides grooming services.
“Crazy right? But it was God, though. He had it all laid out,” Hawkins says gratefully.
Jennifer and her husband, however, were not immediately certain.
“The tricky thing about trainers is they are all different in their methods,” Jennifer explains. “We had been looking for a trainer to partner with for a while, but weren’t finding what we needed.”
She read Hawkins’ book, liked his approach and in 2020 while things were slow during the pandemic, she decided to take a chance.
“He quickly showed us that if he says he will do something, he does it,” she says. “He’s stayed with it and slowly we’ve started depending on him and our customers are super happy with him. He meets the dogs where they are and communicates with them to find out how they respond best.”
Jennifer says she and her husband believe in second chances and admits she’s happy with her decision.
“You know the Serenity Prayer?” Hawkins asks. “God helped me to accept the things I cannot change, gave me the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
In fact, Hawkins recently published his second book: “How to Train a Dog – 12 Steps” (available on Amazon).
He also works with almost 700 dogs locally and is hoping to hire an assistant dog trainer this year. He proudly admits he paid cash for the truck he now drives and owns his own cabin nearby – all possible from the six-figure gross revenue his business now generates.
And he gives back to the community.
“I just got back from Georgia a couple of days ago,” he says. “I went down there to speak at two prisons and showed the guys, hey, you can change your life. You can do this.”
He also shares his story at local drug rehabilitation facilities.
“I feel like God has equipped me. He saved me. He got me through this,” Hawkins says, wiping his eyes. “He’s doing this for me to help others.”