DOC official: COVID ‘exposed’ state prison technology gaps

For some, taking college courses while in prison was just something to do, Ryan Marquis recalled. Between all the people and the noise, the card games and distractions, it was a way to get out of the block for a while and fill up the time that crawled past each day.

But Marquis, 37, was planning to finish school when he got out anyway, and he jumped at the opportunity when Willard-Cybulski Correctional Institution in Enfield offered classes through Asnuntuck Community College in the Second Chance Pell program, a pilot pathway allowing incarcerated people to take classes while receiving Pell grants.

“The Second Chance Pell grant totally, totally put my life on a direct path to success,” Marquis said.

Now, the Brookfield resident is continuing his coursework at Naugatuck Valley Community College, planning to finish his bachelor’s and eventually a graduate degree. But the program that helped launch him on a path toward a degree has been stalled in Connecticut since the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Through the Second Chance Pell program, instructors would come to Connecticut correctional facilities for in-person instruction.

So, when COVID-19 began to spread in the U.S. and visiting restrictions for prisons changed — coupled with limited technology in jails, and grant eligibility issues with correspondence courses, which is when incarcerated people send and receive their work through the mail — that left fewer options for schools participating in the program.

And that meant the four Connecticut community colleges offering classes through Second Chance Pell — Asnuntuck, Three Rivers, Middlesex and Quinebaug Valley — had to suspend in-person instruction for their programs in the spring.

“Right now, we’re kind of stuck. We can’t even get enough of them in a room where we could talk them through the material,” said Michelle Coach, interim CEO of Asnuntuck Community College. “Our program right now is at a standstill.”

The program, which the U.S. Department of Education expanded in April to include 130 schools across the nation, started in 2016 as a way to see whether breaking down barriers to financial aid for incarcerated people would increase educational participation and reduce recidivism. An end date to the program has not been determined, an official from the department wrote in an email.

Since fall 2016, more than 1,000 students have participated in the Second Chance Pell program through Connecticut community colleges, producing 185 graduates and 192 students who earned a degree or certificate, according to data provided by the Connecticut State Colleges & Universities.

Jim Wilkinson, an economics and business professor who teaches through Second Chance Pell, has seen firsthand the effect the program has had on students. Wilkinson said the enthusiasm he’s seen in his former students after they’ve been released is

“beyond belief ” — some have enrolled in colleges after are released, and he recalled a story of one student who listed him as a reference for a job the person ended up getting.

While higher education institutions across the country have switched to distance learning through online platforms, equivalent instruction for students in jails has proven more difficult in some places. Wilkinson said he instructed his students “caveman style” before the pandemic — bringing in articles and scrawling on whiteboards without technology.

“With limited access to internet and extra outside resources, you’ve got to be real creative in order to get the job done,” he said.

Ruth Delaney, a program manager with the Vera Institute of Justice, said her organization worked with the U.S. Department of Education to examine distance learning policies and identify potential options for institutions while maintaining financial aid eligibility.

And Connecticut — which had some of the highest Second Chance Pell enrollment numbers between 2016 and 2019 in participating states, according to the Vera Institute of Justice — faced particularly steep technological limitations, Delaney said.

“We definitely saw Connecticut and Maryland emerged as the two states that had the biggest technology restrictions,” Delaney said. “They just did not seem to be able to find a way to do an email-based communication system, or something that used some controlled version of the internet.”