Kendall Teare

Throughout an election cycle where both presidential candidates campaigned as being “tough on crime,” a plan for criminal justice reform has been taking shape in Connecticut.

Incarcerated students regained eligibility for Pell Grants in July 2023 after nearly three decades of slashed federal prison education funding. The expansion of these grants — which subsidize higher education for students with demonstrated financial need — followed a six-year Second Chance Pell pilot program assessing the impact of federal financial aid for incarcerated students.

Connecticut boasts multiple prison education programs, which span higher education institutions including Yale, the University of New Haven and Quinnipiac University. Brittany LaMarr, who took college classes through Quinnipiac and Trinity College’s joint Prison Project program while she was incarcerated, emphasized the long-term benefits of prison education programs for incarcerated people.

“[Prison higher education] is an injection of ideas, of thought, of discourse, of self-development and growth that doesn’t exist in any other room,” LaMarr said, citing the limited access to books and technology in prisons. “It changes the culture of facilities. It changes the way that people perceive themselves and come home. It has so many life changing components that are beyond just pedagogy.”

With at least 95 percent of incarcerated people set to be eventually released, prison education programs can ease their reentry into society. A 2018 study found that incarcerated people who participated in higher education programs were 28 percent less likely to return to prison. 

Marcus Harvin, who participated in the joint UNH and Yale Prison Education Initiative at Dwight Hall while he was incarcerated, noted that prison education programs also improve people’s job prospects. 

“It makes you more of an enticing candidate for a job,” Harvin said. “As you build your resume, people forget about your record. [Prison education programs] show what you have been doing, as opposed to what you have done.”

Connecticut adapts to new Pell Grant eligibility

A month before Pell Grants were reinstated for incarcerated students, the New England Board of Higher Education released a report outlining recommendations for Connecticut and other New England states to better support prison education programs.

The report prompted Connecticut’s state legislature to pass a law in May requiring the Department of Correction to determine the resources needed to facilitate the state’s prison education programs. The law also calls for the DOC and state budget office to put together a report on their findings by Jan. 1, 2025.

At the end of October, the University of Connecticut’s Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy led a week of programming on what expanded Pell Grant eligibility offers to Connecticut prison education programs. 

LaMarr, a researcher at IMRP, noted that the Pell Grants will supplement incarcerated students’ cost of attendance. Connecticut’s prison education programs, which are offered free of charge to incarcerated people, are currently funded by philanthropic grants and donations. 

The additional Pell Grant revenue will allow prison education programs to provide more classes and expand their programming to other Connecticut prisons, LaMarr said. She added that the new eligibility might encourage other state universities to launch their own programs.

LaMarr hopes the Pell Grants will reduce the “huge disparity between supply and demand” of prison education programs. Gaining entrance in the programs, which have limited student capacity, tends to be highly competitive. For example, the Yale Prison Education Initiative accepted just 12 students out of nearly 600 applicants in 2018. The YPEI two percent acceptance rate rivals the 3.7 percent acceptance rate for Yale College’s class of 2028. 

Harvin and Marisol Garcia — an alumna of Trinity and Quinnipiac’s Prison Project and the joint Wesleyan University and Connecticut State Community College, Middlesex program — raised questions about the expanded eligibility of the federal grants.

Harvin questioned whether people who used their Pell Grant to attend college before incarceration are now ineligible for prison education programs. Pell Grants are generally awarded to undergraduates and are limited to six years of funding. 

Garcia is interested in how the expansion of prison education programs will impact people facing life sentences, and whether they would have limited eligibility for higher education. While Connecticut’s prison education programs currently offer associate and bachelor’s degrees, the additional federal funding could usher in opportunities for master’s degrees, which are available in Maine and California prisons. 

“I don’t think you should limit the ability for people to get education,” Garcia said. “But at the same time, this has us revisiting the whole purpose of life in prison. What do you do with people when they’re in prison for 100 years or for the rest of their lives?”

Garcia and Harvin also described challenges in continuing their education post-prison, underscoring a need for support from prison education programs as students transition into the outside world. 

Garcia, who took some college classes before her incarceration, faced defaulted student loans upon her reentry, complicating the process of getting financial aid to attend college. Though Harvin received a partial scholarship from UNH after his release, he still struggled to cover the hefty tuition needed to complete his associate’s degree.

Harvin, Garcia and LaMarr are also members of the YPEI College-to-Career Fellowship Program, a two-year fellowship at Yale or UNH for alumni of prison education programs. Harvin said the annual YPEI stipend allowed him to focus on his education after his release from prison.

While LaMarr is optimistic about expansions in state prison education programs, she is worried that President-elect Donald Trump will undo many prison education reforms. 

“We’ll do what we can in the state to ensure and utilize what’s available from the federal government, [but] we’ll see what remains in a couple months,” she said. 

Connecticut houses 10,880 people in its state prisons.

Update, Nov. 20: The article has been updated to include that Harvin, Garcia and LaMarr participate in the Yale Prison Education Initiative program.