Working for the Yale Prison Education Initiative this year changed my life.
Every week during my senior year, I’d drive an hour away from New Haven to the Danbury Federal Correctional Institution, weaving through a small neighborhood and up a hill overlooking miles of trees before arriving. The stark difference between the beautiful view and the never-ending barbed wire fencing was shocking at first, but it gradually became a sight I most looked forward to every week. I was running a study hall for incarcerated students, and once arriving, I’d leave everything except my ID, study hall materials and car keys in the car, including my phone, with no access to the outside world for two-and-a-half hours. After going through a metal detector, I’d meet the students waiting for me in the classroom. YPEI, run in partnership with Dwight Hall and the University of New Haven, offers for-credit classes for incarcerated students to work towards their associates’ or bachelors’ degrees.
When I matriculated to Yale, I had been determined to engage in prison reform but found myself wanting more than the work I had done in the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project during my first semester, hoping to make a more tangible impact on currently and formerly incarcerated folks. I then heard of YPEI and had been interested in its mission, but didn’t have time to commit to it — or so I told myself. Then, in the early summer of 2024, right before senior year, I was asked by the Academic Strategies Program — or ASP — of the Office of Educational Opportunity if I was interested in being an ASP mentor for YPEI. Knowing that I had fewer academic and extracurricular commitments this year, and given that I had been interested in making an impact for so long, I decided to go for it. I didn’t expect that anything in my senior year could change the trajectory of my Yale experience, but YPEI did exactly that.
As an ASP mentor for YPEI, my job was to bring the academic skills that we teach here on campus in the Poorvu Center to the students at Danbury. My role was anything but transactional. On my first shifts, the students I met told me stories about their lives and experiences living in the prisons, and I learned more than I ever could have had I just been a peer tutor on campus.
Many stories were light-hearted: conversations about new recipes they had baked during their kitchen shift, discussions about the last baseball game they had watched, or debates over which team they’d be rooting for in the World Series. Some, meanwhile, turned into serious conversations about their everyday lives in the prisons. YPEI had been previously described as a lifeline for students during COVID and an addition that has drastically improved the quality of their lives.
It was, in particular, anecdotes about the medical care YPEI students received that broke my heart. While it’s not unknown how the medical care in prisons is nowhere near up to par, there’s only so much you can read about before you become numb to the news. But hearing these stories from people who had become constants in my life and whom I looked forward to seeing every week was so different.
In one memorable instance, a student asked me for an academic advising form so that she could request to drop a class. When I inquired why, she described the insurmountable stress stemming from her lack of access to much-needed medical care. The student desperately wanted to do well in her economics class, but she felt it wasn’t possible with all the other stressors in her life. She described how her appointments kept getting delayed while her health declined, and she had to wait several more weeks to start getting treatment. She said she had always been perfectly healthy before being incarcerated and was mourning her former state of health. This story was just one of many anecdotes I heard throughout the year.
Even then, I was continually struck by how similar YPEI students are to other Yalies. They stress about studying for exams. They help each other work through problem sets. They’re ambitious about getting admitted to law school or graduate programs and changing the world for the better. They’re Yalies just like us. But they also live with the barriers that existed in these systems before they even arrived — and they still find a way to thrive as students. These students are truly some of the kindest, strongest, and hardest-working people I know.
The electronics-free space along with the calm and scenic drives to and from Danbury have provided me an opportunity to reflect on my own life for hours each week without the distraction of my phone, laptop and the noise of Yale and everyone around me. There have been times during Yale that nearly turned me into a pessimistic nihilist, and my interactions with these students and reflections during the drives have made me re-appreciate the small things in life that we so often take for granted and re-affirmed that there is good in the world and so much we can do to contribute to it. As we graduate, I urge you to be intentional about your time. Don’t become numb and engage in your local communities, especially if it is out of your comfort zone.
KARLEY YUNG is a senior in Berkeley College studying Biomedical Engineering. She can be reached at karley.yung@yale.edu.