What we can learn from Yale’s Prison Education Initiative

Yale College has celebrated the graduation of several US Prison inmates who took part in the school’s new education initiative. The program’s success points to a future of sufficient prison reform. 

Thanks to a new education initiative by Yale College and New Haven University, US inmates like Marcus Harvin are pursuing their dreams of law school.

Harvin is now a fellow at Yale college. He’s also a parolee, recently released from maximum security prison for a six-year drunk driving sentence.

The prison education initiative in which he took part will change Harvin’s life, and the lives of millions of prison inmates worldwide – should the success of the program inspire other institutions beyond the US.

Yale alum Zelda Roland launched the initiative in 2016, drawing inspiration from similar program’s she had worked with at Wesleyan University.

The system provides student-inmates with an opportunity to earn two and four-year college degrees from 15 schools nationwide.

‘We believe that we’re transforming not just individual student’s lives, but also the institutions that we work with, both the universities and the correctional system,’ Roland said of the program.

And last month, various inmates gathered at graduation ceremonies inside prison walls, making up the first class to matriculate under the Yale Prison Education Initiative.

‘We define our futures and today is the start of that’, Governor Ned Lamont said, as the graduation speaker. ‘You learn from the past, but you define your own future’.

News of Yale’s new graduates has been followed by the announcement that around 760,000 US prisoners will be eligible for a free college education under the Pell Grant.

According to The Hill, the Pell Grant was expanded on the 1st July 2023 to allow people in prison to access federal aid for schooling – something which had previously been banned in the US.

The grant will see students behind bars receive up to $130 million in financial aid annually. For many, this opportunity can mean the difference between leaving prison with a new life ahead of them, or ending up back behind bars.

But in a country where college education is notoriously expensive and inaccessible, many aren’t happy with the Pell Grant’s expansion.

American’s have argued for years that the nation’s prison system is too lenient, ‘with free meals, free exercise equipment, free religious services, free counselling, and free college education’.

Kara Henson has suggested that inmates take their privileges for granted, given that ‘hard-working American citizens fight every day to be their best, striving to succeed as far as they can. Why is it fair that inmates, citizens who have committed crimes, are able to receive a college education for free?’.

There are a plethora of issues with this argument, not least the suggestion that America’s overcrowded, underfunded, and frankly unethical prison system (and wider criminal justice system) is by any stretch of the imagination ‘lenient.’