This fall, I moderated a keynote session for our University of New Haven Faculty Professional Development Day. I was joined by Marcus Harvin, a graduate of the prison education program, Michael Rossi, Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Tracy Westmoreland, Site Director for YPEI at FCI Danbury, Bradley Woodworth, a history professor, and Douglas Ficek, a philosophy professor. Our conversation was rich (unfortunately not recorded), but I can share my opening remarks.
I’m Mary Isbell and I’m an English professor. Our goal this morning is to tell you a little about the Prison Education Program at the University of New Haven. We are extremely proud to participate in this incredible program, and we want to help you learn more about how it works. We also want to share some of the ways that the program has transformed our thinking about the power of higher education.
To get started, I want to share some details about the program and then I’m going to ask our panel to introduce themselves, explaining their roles in the program.
There are three institutions where we are offering courses
MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution is a maximum security prison for males in Suffield Connecticut. The Yale Prison Education Initiative has been offering courses at MacDougall since 2022; we started offering University of New Haven courses (which build toward University of New Haven degrees) in 2023 with the support of the Mellon Foundation.
We started offering courses in the women’s facility at FCI Danbury in 2023. This is a low security federal correctional institution with an adjacent minimum security satellite camp. We started offering courses at the camp in 2024.
To date, we have offered 62 University of New Haven courses (45 unique courses). Yale faculty also offer courses at both facilities, but these numbers don’t include their offerings.
42 unique University of New Haven faculty members have taught in the program. Many more than are on this panel. If you’ve taught in this program, can you raise your hand?
With that, why don’t I let all of you introduce yourselves, explaining your roles in the program.
[self-introductions]
Now, there are many more details about the program that we want to share, but I want to frame that discussion by starting with some big ideas that impact all of us as faculty. After setting us in motion it will be my job to clarify some of the practical aspects of teaching and learning in prison that I know folks are curious about. So, the two big ideas are PRIVILEGE and MOTIVATION. Teaching inside a correctional facility means that every time I teach my class of 10 or so students at FCI Danbury, I see many more incarcerated women who are not in our program. This has reminded me that a college education is a privilege that is not available to everyone (something that we can lose sight of when everyone on our campus is for the most part enrolled at the university). There are MANY high school graduates who don’t apply to college because they don’t think the privilege is within their grasp (and many more who don’t finish high school). Students in the prison education program are VERY conscious of the privilege they’ve been given, and this translates into a level of motivation that has reminded us all why we wanted to be teachers. Experiencing a classroom full of highly motivated students at FCI Danbury has helped me focus my energy in West Haven on encouraging those privileged few in my classes to take full advantage of the opportunity, even when they might not recognize it as such. I want to invite our panelists to share their experiences of these two things—on the one hand the privilege of a college education and on the other the motivation it takes to make the most of it.
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