They were poets and lawyers and screenwriters and essayists. They just didn’t know it. That goes to the mission of the Yale Prison Education Initiative at Dwight Hall, according to deputy director Vanessa Estimé: for those who are incarcerated “to unleash what was inside of them already.”    The occasion, attended by an audience of 40 Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) students and community members, was a justice panel at SCSU. The focus: the second chances afforded by a host of local nonprofits to those who have been incarcerated and how they strive to make those chances stick. Along with the YPEI, the panel, hosted by Derek Faulkner, project coordinator with the university’s Research and Innovation Division, featured representatives from Newhallville Fresh Starts, EMERGE CT, and CONECT.  “A lot of our students might have missed the opportunity to engage in college, and what it develops,” said Estimé of YPEI, which has been providing college access and other support programming to men and women who are incarcerated in Connecticut since 2018. “Now they have that opportunity, and what’s been inside of them all along finally has a place to come forward.” She said YPEI’s work continues once its students come home. Thanks to the strength of its alumni network and community partners, “we’re able to walk with them and help them achieve whatever the goals they have now that they’re home,” she said. Part of that is looking at each student as a full individual. “If they have particular need, whether healthwise or finance-wise or something else, we are looking out in the community to see what organization can support them.”   CONECT’s Dawn Grant-Lockley with Tabari “Ra” Hashim of EMERGE CT. Tabari “Ra” Hashim, case worker at EMERGE CT, an organization that aims to provide formerly incarcerated people with jobs and support services to ease their reintegration into society, said his focus is on personal development. “You have to realize reentry is traumatic,” he said. “You’re caged up, you’re stuck in yourself, for months and years, and then you get out, and it’s not like flipping a switch. It takes time. You’re vulnerable.” As EMERGE has recognized, a steady job can smooth the transition. Hashim said crew members, once they’ve completed the enrollment process, can earn at least $18 an hour in construction, landscaping, and property management, jobs that afford them marketable skills. Each month, he said, there are 15 to 30 new enrollees; 70 percent of them got a job. “This year, we’re shooting for 80 percent,” he said. With the money they make, EMERGE schools them in financial literacy. “We focus on managing money, getting a savings account, credit repair, and budgeting,” he said. “Brothers who lose certain funds and don’t have the tools to manage their money, they go back to what they know.” Dawn Grant-Lockley, who’s on the criminal legal reform team with Congregations Organized for a New Connecticut (CONECT), discussed her work on Clean Slate legislation, a law that allows for the erasure of criminal records for people who remain crime-free for seven to ten years. Since its implementation in 2025, she said, “there are over 150,000 people in the state whose records have been completely sealed.” Speaking from personal experience, Grant-Lockley, who was incarcerated, recounted job interviews where, “the moment you say you have a criminal record, it’s, ‘We’ll get back to you,’ and then you don’t hear from them.” Then, she said, “you have to figure out how you’re gonna pay your bills, eat, live, feed your children. And Clean Slate helps to alleviate some of that.” Marcus Harvin, founder of Newhallville Fresh Starts LLC, said he got to thinking about human dignity while incarcerated at McDougall-Walker Correctional Institution. He recalled the way he and fellow inmates got their meals. “They feed you through a trap, the same trap they put cleaning supplies through before they feed you, worse than someone feeds an animal,” he said. Not long after he came home, he formed Fresh Starts. In the last two-and-a-half years, Harvin and his team have delivered upwards of 100,000 meals to people in homeless shelters, warming centers, homes for disabled veterans, and domestic violence refuges, with excess food from the dining halls of area universities, as well as donations from local restaurants.   “I realized the first step toward making a change in your life for the better is getting a good meal,” he said. “You can’t do much when you don’t have a meal in you.” That’s one part of it. “When we feed people, we serve them,” he said. “We are in service to them. We hold the meal out to them and we meet their eye. These are people who have been made to believe that they mean nothing, so we specialize in giving them back their personhood, their dignity. That is their fresh start.”  Asked how people could get involved, Harvin, himself a YPEI graduate and currently a first-year law student at Western New England School of Law, suggested that they start with Estimé’s group. “The most important thing is right here, because it’s people you can’t see getting this life-changing learning opportunity,” he said, gesturing at her. “And then and only then can those people get to Ra and Dawn and me.” The post Justice Panel Finds Second Chances appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less