SCSU Justice Panel Highlights Second Chances After Prison
A panel at Southern Connecticut State University spotlighted four organizations helping incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people rebuild their lives.
Forty students packed a room at Southern Connecticut State University last week to hear something you don’t often get in a college panel format: raw, practical testimony about what it actually takes to rebuild a life after incarceration.
The occasion was a justice panel hosted by Derek Faulkner, project coordinator with SCSU’s Research and Innovation Division. Four organizations sent representatives: the Yale Prison Education Initiative at Dwight Hall, Newhallville Fresh Starts, EMERGE CT, and CONECT. Each works a different corner of the same problem. Together, they painted a picture of a reentry ecosystem that’s quietly doing serious work across Connecticut.
“What Was Inside of Them Already”
Vanessa Estimé, deputy director of the Yale Prison Education Initiative, framed her organization’s mission with a line that stuck: the goal is for incarcerated students “to unleash what was inside of them already.” Poets. Lawyers. Screenwriters. Essayists. People who had no idea they were any of those things until someone handed them a curriculum and took them seriously.
YPEI has provided college access and support programming to incarcerated men and women in Connecticut since 2018. But Estimé was clear that the work doesn’t stop at the prison gate. Once students come home, the organization’s alumni network and community partners stay involved. “We’re able to walk with them and help them achieve whatever the goals they have now that they’re home,” she said.
That includes connecting returning students to outside resources. “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,” Estimé said. That’s not case management in the bureaucratic sense. It’s closer to a support network with teeth.
The Job Is the Foundation
Tabari “Ra” Hashim, a caseworker at EMERGE CT, didn’t mince words about what reentry actually feels like. “You have to realize reentry is traumatic,” he told the audience. “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.”
EMERGE CT’s answer to that vulnerability is straightforward: get people working. Fast.
Once enrollees complete the intake process, they can earn at least $18 an hour doing construction, landscaping, and property management. Not dead-end gigs. Jobs that build marketable skills and a resume. Hashim said 15 to 30 new people enroll each month, and 70 percent of them land a job. His target for this year is 80 percent.
Still, a paycheck alone doesn’t close the loop. EMERGE layers financial literacy on top of employment. Credit repair, budgeting, savings accounts. “Brothers who lose certain funds and don’t have the tools to manage their money, they go back to what they know,” Hashim said. It’s a frank acknowledgment that income without financial education doesn’t actually change trajectories.
Why This Matters Beyond New Haven
Connecticut’s recidivism rate has drawn sustained attention from policymakers in Hartford, and the General Assembly has wrestled for years with how to fund reentry services without treating them as a line item to cut when budgets get tight. What organizations like EMERGE CT, YPEI, CONECT, and Newhallville Fresh Starts are doing is essentially providing the infrastructure that state policy keeps promising to build. They’re doing it with nonprofit budgets and staff who often have personal experience with the system they’re trying to fix.
For Connecticut residents who follow the state budget closely, that gap matters. Reentry services that work cost money upfront and save substantially more downstream, in avoided incarceration costs that run well north of $60,000 per person per year at Connecticut’s Department of Correction.
The SCSU panel, reported by the New Haven Independent, wasn’t a policy summit. It was 40 students sitting with people doing the unglamorous work of reentry, asking questions, and listening.
What to Watch
EMERGE CT’s push to hit an 80 percent job placement rate this year is worth tracking. That’s an ambitious benchmark for any workforce program, let alone one serving a population that faces hiring discrimination, housing instability, and the psychological weight Hashim described. If they hit it, that’s a model worth scaling. If they fall short, the gap will tell its own story about what more Connecticut needs to provide.
The General Assembly’s next budget cycle will test whether the state treats organizations like these as partners or afterthoughts.