HUNTSVILLE – It's a little after 11 A.M. when Texas Department of Criminal Justice guards release the dogs on a farm outside Huntsville. Jason Kozlow, a state prison inmate, already has a one-hour head start.

Few know it, but he gets out just about once a week, often running through fields, jumping barbed-wire fences and climbing trees.

"Sarge gives us a map and we follow the map and we're teaching the dogs to track," Kozlow explained in a tattered white shirt and white denim pants a hundred yards off a dirt road.

Kozlow isn't human bait. He's a volunteer with 10 crossbred hounds, black, brown and blue speck, fast on his trail.  

"That's right,” said Rodney Cooper, TDCJ Deputy Director for Prison/Jail Management. “It's all voluntary. We don't force any inmates to do this."

This is the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s tracking dog program where inmates train hounds to find felons and escapees.

"We have approx 1,450 to 1,500 dogs throughout the state," TDCJ Captain William Dalton, wearing a starched uniform, cowboy hat and silver reflective sunglasses, added. The dogs are stationed at 41 of TDCJ’s more than 110 prison and state jail units.

The dogs don't bite but rather alert guards on horseback monitoring their progress.

Kozlow is serving a 17-year sentence from north Texas. Once a week his prison job is outside the razor wire of the Wynne Unit on a nearby farm owned by Sam Houston State University.

"It's a sense of freedom when you're out here,” Kozlow said about the tracking do training. “There's nobody around. Just you and nature. It's just great."

It has been more than a decade since anyone can remember an inmate walking off during a drill like this, especially with dogs already in pursuit.

Last week however an inmate of the TDCJ’s Stringfellow Unit in Brazoria County drowned while working with some of the prison’s dogs at a nearby creek.

Since September 2006, when the fiscal year began, the tracking dogs and bloodhounds have gone out on real life calls more than 160 times. That's almost twice a week. Not just for TDCJ but also local police, the FBI and even Border Patrol.

"We also have dogs that we can use to find lost children, dogs that we can use to find elderly when they runoff away from home,” Cooper continued.

The hounds find their targets 70 percent of the time. They caught Kozlow today, too, perched in a tree about seven feet off the ground.

This is part of the dogs’ daily exercises to keep their senses sharp for a real emergency.