Baala Shakya, Staff Photographer

A 2023 law promised to issue state identification cards to incarcerated people prior to their release from prison. Yet a year and a half later, advocates say some Connecticut residents are still leaving prison without any formal identification. 

Legal scholar James Bhandary-Alexander works alongside Yale Law School students at the Transitions Clinic, which provides health and social support for people recently released from prison. From his first day at the clinic, the lack of identification cards was a clear problem.

“Without that ID, a person has no chance of getting housing or a job or public benefits, which means the most likely place for them to wind up is either on the streets or back in jail,” Bhandary-Alexander said.

Incarcerated people tend to misplace or lose ID cards while they are in prison, Bhandary-Alexander explained. Additionally, those incarcerated for lengthy periods of time may not leave prison before their ID cards expire.

Staff and volunteers at the Transitions Clinic often work one-on-one with formerly incarcerated people to secure state ID cards. Monya Saunders, a community health worker at the clinic, helps formerly incarcerated people consolidate identification documents — such as birth certificates, social security cards and information on their place of residence — and accompanies them to the Department of Motor Vehicles to obtain their new ID card. 

However, Bhandary-Alexander and Saunders said the Department of Correction should take the lead in distributing ID cards to incarcerated people before they leave prison. They noted that formerly incarcerated people already face challenges when seeking housing and employment due to their criminal records, and a lack of an ID card further complicates their adjustment process to the outside world. 

“To come back home and integrate back into their community with no ID is just unheard of,” Saunders said. “It’s a big, big plan for failure for these folks.”

Ashley McCarthy, director of external affairs for the Connecticut DOC, highlighted the DOC’s efforts to improve ID distribution to incarcerated people since House Bill 6875 was signed into law in June 2023. 

The DOC hired three additional staff for its re-entry unit, which is tasked with helping incarcerated people transition back into society, including facilitating ID distribution. The unit had 16 employees prior to the bill’s passage.

Bhandary-Alexander applauded this additional staffing and said he hopes the DOC will allocate more funds to its re-entry unit this year.

“The DOC does a hell of a lot more good preparing people for re-entry than it does with other, more punitive measures,” he said. “It’s a great use of staff time in terms of actually trying to fulfill its correctional mission.”

The DOC also set up a database that tracks how many incarcerated people were provided with ID cards prior to their release. Since the database was established in September, 96.4 percent of the incarcerated people released from prison were provided with state ID cards, according to McCarthy.

For Bhandary-Alexander and Saunders, recent improvements have not yet trickled down to their clinic. Saunders estimated about two thirds of individuals lacked identification cards. 

McCarthy attributed the distribution delays to communication between government agencies, rather than a lack of DOC re-entry staff. 

“There’s a lot of moving parts,” she said, noting that the DOC collaborates with both the DMV and the Social Security Administration to obtain state IDs for incarcerated people. “There’s local and federal agencies that each have their own protocols.”

McCarthy added that the DOC especially struggles to secure ID cards for incarcerated people born in Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories, which sometimes require in-person appearances to obtain required identification.

House Bill 6875 called for an official DOC report about the agency’s efforts to provide ID cards to be released by Jan. 1. McCarthy said the report has been drafted and is currently being revised by DOC staff.

The Transitions Clinic has two New Haven locations: one at 150 Sargent Dr. and the other at 911 State St.