Graduates Alpha Jalloh, left, and Marcus Harvin, right, embrace at the first-ever college graduation ceremony at MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution, Friday, June 9, 2023, in Suffield, Conn. The ceremony was held under a partnership established in 2021 by the University of New Haven and the Yale Prison Education Initiative. At first, Marcus Harvin called it a “blessing” and then changed his word to “miracle.
“Yes, we've made mistakes,” Harvin told Yahoo News. “But just because we've made mistakes doesn't mean that we can't make a difference in this world and make a change within ourselves, so that the things we've done will just be the things we've done, not the things we do.”Zelda Roland, a Yale alum, created the program in 2016 and reached out to UNH for the partnership. She modeled it after a similar program she worked in at Wesleyan University.
The program is far from easy. “We work in a prison that has about 1,500 men; it's the largest prison in the Northeast,” Roland said. “Six hundred people asked to be considered for our first 12-person class. So it is extremely competitive to get into this program and it takes serious commitment to get through it,” she said.For Harvin, the juxtaposition of taking classes behind bars and on campus could be a tough adjustment.
Harvin said the program helped him make a complete turnaround. After finishing high school in 2006, he went to Eastern Connecticut State University and left with a 1.7 GPA. He said he finished UNH with around a 3.8 GPA.
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