Thousands of incarcerated people in Connecticut want to enroll in higher education — and financial aid is available — but limited space and resources in the state’s prison system have prevented the programs from expanding to meet the demand.
About 320 incarcerated people were enrolled in higher education programs as of October 2024. That’s a fraction of the estimated 3,000 people who are eligible.
State leaders, correction officials and educators say a shortage of classrooms and a lack of internet access are key barriers.
“With the classroom space we are currently allotted, we are really only able to admit maybe 12 to 15 students per year out of hundreds who express interest annually,” Zelda Roland, founding director of the University of New Haven Prison Education Program and the Yale Prison Education Initiative, said during a meeting of the Criminal Justice Policy Advisory Committee last month. The Yale initiative offers college courses at MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield and degrees through its partnership with University of New Haven, and is one of several programs run by Connecticut colleges and universities in the state’s prison system.
Funding to expand the programs is available — in the form of individual tuition stipends, known as Pell Grants — but without the space and equipment to field a larger number of students, the programs can’t grow. The maximum Pell Grant amount for 2025-26 is about $7,400 per student.
“The scale of this unmet need is astounding,” said Daniel Karpowitz, undersecretary of criminal justice policy and planning at the state’s Office of Policy and Management, during the meeting last month.
“If we measure it simply in the failure to draw down the millions of dollars that the federal government is offering us and our higher ed partners to do this, it’s staggering,” Karpowitz said.
In March, the Office of Policy and Management released a report underscoring the changes needed in the state prison system in order for more people to access post-secondary studies while incarcerated. Some of the biggest barriers included a lack of designated space and availability of technology and internet access, as well as the need for increased administrative and academic support for students and a clear pathway to graduation if they are released from prison before they finish their degrees.
Roland said students in the Yale Prison Education Initiative don’t have internet access — nor do their professors. And all the teaching material that comes into the facility has to be approved by Department of Correction officials.
That creates extra barriers for students doing something as routine as writing a research paper, Roland said. “It is an extremely onerous and lengthy process to be able to access that research that on campus takes a student a matter of seconds to locate and have access to.”
Teresa Foley, who oversees CT State Community College programs for incarcerated students, said many students don’t have access to laptop computers. Even if those computers aren’t connected to the internet, she said, they still offer opportunities to learn how to use word processing and presentation software like Microsoft Word and PowerPoint — skills that will be necessary once students have returned to their regular lives.
“When they get out, they have this great digital divide to try to cross, to try to readapt to society where technology has just advanced and they haven’t had the opportunity to participate in that,” Foley said.
Pell opportunity
It’s only recently that Pell Grant aid once again became widely available to eligible students in Connecticut prisons.
In 1994, the U.S. Congress barred incarcerated people from receiving Pell Grant funding, and the availability of post-secondary education for incarcerated people across the country declined.
In the first decade of the 2000s, several Connecticut schools began teaching college courses in correctional institutions. Wesleyan University started offering classes at Cheshire Correctional Institution through its Center for Prison Education, later expanding to York Correctional Institution. Trinity College and Quinnipiac University also began offering classes at different facilities.
In 2015, the Obama administration created the Second Chance Pell Program, a pilot that gave colleges the opportunity to apply to use Pell funding toward higher education in prison. Four of Connecticut’s community colleges were approved and began offering courses to incarcerated men and women. Wesleyan and University of New Haven also received funding.
In 2016, Yale University formed the Yale Prison Education Initiative and began offering classes at MacDougall-Walker. In 2021 they partnered with University of New Haven to offer degrees.
And in 2020, the Trump administration restored Pell eligibility to all incarcerated people, beginning in the year 2023.
The various universities and colleges now offer a variety of degree programs within the state’s Department of Correction. They often share classrooms that are used for USD #1, the school district housed within the department.
OPM’s Karpowitz called the Pell Grant change as the “largest federal intervention into the condition of confinement in American prisons in our lifetime.”
It’s not the only source of funding aimed at expanding higher education in Connecticut prisons.
In recent years, the state Department of Correction received $3 million in coronavirus relief funds to expand high-speed broadband access in an effort to improve higher education in the facilities. Andrius Banevicius, spokesperson for the department, said the funding was slated for updates to telecommunication infrastructure at Brooklyn, MacDougall-Walker, Osborn, Carl Robinson and York correctional institutions.
Banevicius said that since the vast majority of incarcerated men and women return to their communities after serving their sentence, “it is in everybody’s best interest to give these individuals as many opportunities as possible to enhance the likelihood of successful reentry.”
He said studies have shown that education during incarceration reduces the risk that someone will end up back in prison. Even for individuals who don’t return to their communities, Banevicius said opportunities for learning “promote a sense of accomplishment, self-worth and prosocial behavior, in turn, creating a safer prison environment for all.”
Foley, of CT State, said professors learn to adapt creatively to the restrictions — and some actually enjoy teaching in the program more than they do on campus. The students “are engaged with the materials in a very active manner, so that they’re always coming to class with all kinds of questions and examples and just exploring topics that the instructors are not necessarily getting from students on campus,” Foley said.
Leaders of prison higher education programs say their graduates have gone on to start businesses and work at organizations that help people who are incarcerated. And Karpowitz said that when people who are incarcerated begin studying for a college degree, the high school graduation rates in their families also increase.
“This is an intergenerational priority. And we are missing the boat, currently,” Karpowitz said.
‘A one-room schoolhouse’
While the programs provide opportunities, they remain frustratingly limited.
Tess Wheelwright, director of Wesleyan’s Center for Prison Education, said her program rotates between two classrooms at Cheshire — where they offer seven classes per semester to between 50 and 60 students — and one classroom at York, where they offer four classes to 20-30 students.
“ Imagine a one-room schoolhouse that is sometimes being used for other programs,” Wheelwright said.
Professors have access to whiteboards and a projector they can use to show PowerPoint presentations. Everything has to be approved by the Department of Correction before it can be shown in class. This, plus the lack of internet, makes it hard to present anything spontaneously, Wheelwright said.
“ Faculty in 2025 are so accustomed to googling a TED talk or pulling down a video of the geological phenomenon they’re trying teaching about, and that’s not possible there,” she said.
And classes are only one component of what it means to be a college student. Wheelwright said Wesleyan’s program brings in writing tutors to the prison during study hall. But she said that connecting students with student services like peer tutoring, the writing center and office hours has been difficult.
If the prisons had internet access, she said, “I think the first thing we would use it for (are) some of these appointments with campus offices there to support student success.”
Roland, at Yale/UNH, also said she’d like to have laptops with internet available so incarcerated students can attend office hours with professors on Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
Karpowitz said the state is looking at how to integrate internet into correctional facilities and has already identified 1 million square feet across those campuses for the installation of high-speed broadband.
The Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy at the University of Connecticut has also developed a series of modules designed to teach people who are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated how to use the internet for things like telehealth, applying for jobs and education. The institute is also looking to partner with libraries to improve services for people who are incarcerated and on community supervision.
Wheelwright and Roland both said Pell Grants wouldn’t fully cover the cost of their programs, including laptops, paying faculty and additional student services. The colleges make up the difference using private grants and donations.
There are other challenges to the success of the programs. Within DOC, it’s fairly common for incarcerated people to be moved from one facility to another. For someone participating in a higher education program, a transfer can effectively halt their educational progress.
Roland and Wheelwright said facility lockdowns — which are also fairly common — impede professors’ abilities to finish all of their course material and it reduces study time for students.
This story was originally published by The Connecticut Mirror and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.