Randye Kaye first met Kyle Gonzalez during a visit to Possible Futures, a New Haven bookstore.
Kyle attended a college program through the Yale Prison Education Initiative while he was serving a 15-year sentence. Once the program was over, there was an abundance of books that were left behind. Kyle and a group of his friends decided to donate them.
KG: I was in the cell with one of my friends. His name is Ricky, and his mother actually lives right across the street. I was telling him what I wanted to do with the extra books. He said that he actually knows those books are right across the street. His mother reached out to Lauren, and Lauren and I connected. We donated a couple of boxes of books. We were sending them from our own, you know, money from our commissary or whatever. And then we were just having conversations about what we could do more. And so it led into doing a soap drive, where we went around the prison, and we're asking people to donate a soap, and then we ran, well, not we, Lauren organized the entire soap drive for us, me and a bunch of people. We sent out a bunch of soaps over here, and then people at the store came here, and they packed them together with other things that were donated and brought by other members that are affiliated with Possible Futures, and they handed them out to the Ann house. It was about 100 packages. So it was a beautiful event.
WSHU: Kyle was inspired by another inmate.
KG: It was a group of us, you know, having conversations, but it was one man in particular. His name is Justin, who was actually organizing his own soap drives by going around and asking people, literally like, “Hey, do you want to donate a soap? I'm going to donate a bar of soap to a homeless shelter.” His mother experienced homelessness while he was incarcerated. And so if it was something that he was very, you know, close with in his heart, so it was his idea that I kind of brought to Lauren, and Lauren loved it. And so we just did that. But as far as being incarcerated and giving back, it's a way to show that there's more to us than just what it was that we did. And so we think about our crimes in a very specific way, right? Especially people who were in the rooms and spaces with me. We think about them in a way where we impacted communities negatively because of ignorance. And now that we're enlightened in some kind of way, we want to impact them positively consciously, you know? So that's what we do.
WSHU: Who do you help or serve right now, and how?
KG: Right now, I am trying to help and serve this community that we're in currently.
WSHU: By doing…
KG: I want to help with any event that she has coming up, but I also want to schedule or kind of organize my own event. Hopefully, it's gonna be something extremely similar to what we did. I have friends who are still on the inside who want to donate. So, one specifically, his name is Alan. He wants to do socks. He was in a group home when he was growing up, and he experienced times when he had no clothes. So socks are easy to acquire while in there. Buy them off the commissary for a couple of dollars. He wants to collect them, then donate them. So I want to organize with that.
WSHU: What do you think is inspiring all of you to want to make this turn and bring positivity back to your neighborhoods?
KG: I think being like exposed to critical thinking, right in this kind of very specific way, where you understand your environment and you understand the things that led up to not your incarceration specifically, because it's not really always about you. It's about the mass incarceration that we see around the United States. So you understand, you know, the environments in a different way. You see how our path kind of led us here. And so once you're once we become aware of those things, then we want to break free from what it was that was holding us back, which is ignorance, right? We experienced it almost together. There were 12 of us who got into the first cohort of Yale Prison Education Initiative, out of 1500 people in McDougal. And we kind of experienced that just by listening to each other's stories and talking about different books, we experienced like it's college courses. So it's heavy, you know what I'm saying, heavy load to read, and sometimes it's bogged down by, like, Western you know, I'm saying philosophies or whatever. But we use that as a way to start the conversation. And we understand now positivity is the way to go. It's not about, you know what I'm saying, pride or ego, or you know what you don't know. It's about figuring out how to solve problems with each other.
WSHU: When your friends get out, will you be here for them?
KG: Absolutely, waiting for them to come out.
WSHU: So three Little questions, who inspires you? Is the first one?
KG: Emme.
WSHU: Why?
KG: Well, while we were on the inside, she did so much for us, but it didn't stop there. She does so much for every community that she enters into, and so she's very conscious about what she does and how she moves. So it's inspiring to me to be the same way.
WSHU: Can you tell us who Emme is?
KG: So Emmy is the program coordinator for Yale Prison Education Initiative, and among other things, though she is, she's a community activist, a community leader, and a great friend.
WSHU: Is there a particular quote or philosophy that you carry with you in your head that helps
KG: Do what makes you happy?
WSHU: What makes you happy?
KG: Giving back. I like bringing people together so they can give back on a larger scale than just individually.
WSHU: All right, thank you. And last question, why do you think we're here on earth?
KG: To affect positive change.
WSHU: After my conversation with Kyle, I wanted to learn more about the Yale program. So Zelda Roland and Alpha Jalloh came by our studios to tell me more about it.
ZR: My name is Zelda Roland. I am the founding director of the Yale Prison Education Initiative at Dwight Hall, and I also serve as the founding director of the University of New Haven Prison Education Program.
AJ: My name is Alpha Jalloh, and I am a junior at Yale University and an alumnus of Yale Prison Education Initiative.
WSHU: My first question is just to ask you about the Yale Prison Education Initiative at Dwight Hall. Zelda, maybe you can tell me a little bit about what inspired you to get it started, what they do, and then, alpha, I'd love it if you'd share your perspective.
ZR: Well, we're actually coming up on our 10-year anniversary. I had been a graduate student at Yale and was volunteering in a program run by Wesleyan University in a maximum security prison in Cheshire. I started volunteering, really by happenstance, in this program. I was finishing a PhD in art history and Film and Media Studies. And I'd been teaching at that point at Yale for a while, I'd been teaching my own classes. I TA’ed other classes. And from the first day, really, that I walked into these classrooms at Cheshire, the students in the classrooms were truly among the best students I had ever had the privilege of working with. They were omnivorous, they were diligent, they were excited. They could really talk about the value of a liberal arts education, which was something that I think a lot of my peers or students I had really, actually didn't appreciate. They couldn't explain to you why they had opted into a liberal arts college degree, and it was those students in that program at Cheshire who said to me, we really need more programs like this. You should start a program at Yale.
There were two real reasons at the time why they were urging me to look into what it would be like to start a program like it at Yale. A lot of these guys had transferred from other prisons around Connecticut just for the opportunity to apply to this one liberal arts college program in a Connecticut prison. So they knew that there would be a real need and a real desire for programs like it. And they also knew better than even I did at that time that when Yale does something, other institutions take note and follow, and that if we could pull off a program at Yale, it would make an outsized impact. Which we have found has indeed been the case. And I get calls all the time from other institutions across the country asking about our program. So it started with that, and it took a few years and a lot of pushback from the administration at the university, but in 2018 we were able to offer our first credit bearing college classes at another high maximum security state department of corrections facility, McDougall Walker Correctional Institution for our first 12 person college class, over 600 people asked to be considered for admission, which demonstrates the real desire and. Need for classes like ours.
We began by offering just a smattering of liberal arts college classes, English, sociology, philosophy, and some visual arts classes through an amazing partnership we have with the Yale School of Art, and we grew from there. We've been admitting new cohorts every year of 12 to 15 students. We can only admit 12 to 15 students because we are constrained by two things, really. One is classroom space inside the facilities, and the other is funding. We raise most of the funding for this program through individual donations and private grants. In 2021, we established an amazing partnership with the University of New Haven, which was launched with an incredible and substantial $1.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, the largest funder of the humanities in the United States. At that point, the University of New Haven, YPEI, and Yale began collaborating on what is now a year-round degree-granting program. We offer two-year AA degrees and four-year BA degrees, wow, in three different prisons in Connecticut. So one is still that first facility, McDougall, where we started. We are also offering programming and degrees at the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. Danbury, you may know, has two women's prisons and a men's prison. We are currently offering college degrees at the two women's prisons, and we do hope to expand our program.
RK; And McDougall is men?
ZR: Men's state.
RK: Okay, and what's the third one?
ZR: So there's two women's federal facilities. One is a low-security facility, and one is a camp at Danbury. And actually, at Danbury, we are currently offering the only college degree program available to any women in any federal prison in the US, distressing but important.
WSHU: That is so amazing. Of course, I have a lot of questions. This is your history, but I'm going to turn to you, Alpha, and tell us your story with the Yale Prison Education Initiative.
AJ: Yeah. So I'm actually a graduate of YPEI. So I was incarcerated. I'm from the South Bronx. I'm from one of the largest housing projects in New York City, and in 2017 I got sentenced to eight years. During that time, I was constantly in trouble. I would like to say sometimes it was good trouble, like the Congressman John Lewis, would say, right? I was fighting for the rights of incarcerated people in prison, right? And sometimes that would get me in trouble, right? I was constantly in segregation, and one day, my father passed away. Another incarcerated person who was a tier worker. He came to my cell just to express his condolences, and he passed me a book. The book was Soledad Brother by George Jackson. George Jackson was a black revolutionary, and he was also incarcerated. I was just like, so amazed at the way that he expressed himself in that book. And I was just like, “Yo, like, I want to express myself in this way”, and I know I can't, and my father had passed away, it's just like a spiritual awakening for me, coupled with reading that book. So when I left segregation that time, that was the last time that I went to segregation. And segregation is like, you know, an inner prison within prison, right? And I decided, like, Hey, I'm going to change my life. I'm going to make positive changes in my life, and I'm going to try to be a leader. I was already kind of a leader, but led positively, right? So, yeah, I enrolled in college. I signed up for college. It was a very arduous process.
WSHU: Yeah, what's the process like? What do you have to do?
AJ: Okay, so you have to complete an application. I think there are two steps in the application, like you do with a regular application, then you have to do a longer essay, and then you hand that in. If they feel like your application is adequate, they'll call you in for an interview. And then you have to sit down in front of Zelda and two other people, and they ask you questions, right? And then you come back for a second round of interviews. Then you come back for a mock class session.
WSHU: It's a lot. Can I ask you a question before you go on? Because I'm a huge believer in the value of human connection, the fact that this was a book that was brought to you by somebody instead of a book that you just picked up, do you think it had more value because somebody that you felt connected to suggested it to you?
AJ: Absolutely. It wasn't just the passing of an object, right like when somebody hands you a pencil or a pen, the person was saying to me, like, Hey, you're going through grief right now, but I see you, and I value you, and I see your potential, and that's what. The person was expressing to me, like, Hey, you can be a completely different person. And actually, that person had a life sentence. That person had a life sentence, and he was trying to do a good deed by passing me that book. And, you know, everything that I accomplish now and everything that I'm doing now is because of him, and he kind of understood that. So he was kind of prophetic, you know, in a way.
WSHU: The process of taking the classes and getting to graduation, like, how long did that take? How hard did you work?
AJ: Yeah, so it took about two years. In the beginning, it was a struggle. I hadn't been in school for years. So to be in, you know, a program affiliated with the University of New Haven and Yale, it was just like, you know, it's rigorous, right? And that rigidity I hadn't, you know, been used to in a while. As a matter of fact, I have never been in that type of academic environment, right? So, yeah, like I would, you know, struggle at first with the text that we were reading, with the concept that we were coming across in class. Was there help for you? Tutoring? Absolutely. We had tutoring, right? The students were very helpful. My peers were very helpful, right? They understood that, hey, these are newer students. They need some help. They might need some guidance, and they always stepped in. But also, I helped myself. I used to go back to my cell, six by 10 cells the size of a closet, and I would study for up to eight, nine hours, sometimes just trying to understand exactly what I was reading. I would have my dictionary. There was no internet, so obviously…
WSHU: You don't have access to research, you know, the way kids do it. Now, you're certainly not getting AI to help you, right? So you have to do research the old-fashioned way with books, where there are libraries available for you?
AJ: So we actually have a research network, where we fill out a form, entailing what we're looking for as far as research, and then a student goes out and does the research for us and brings in papers. But sometimes we would have conduct research over the phone, also, let's say I'm talking to my mother, I'd be like, Hey, can you look this up for me? And I’d write it down.
WSHU: I love it. What difference has this made in your life? This program? Are you? Are you changed?
AJ: Am I changed? I can't really express the difference it's made in my life. I would say, if we think about recidivism, and we think about the carceral system, and we think about that question, have you changed? Right? I'm still the same Alpha. I still have so much love, the same type of love that I've had before prison. I still care about family, my friends. So if you say like change, as far as changing as a person, as a system, wants you to change and become another person, no, I haven't changed. I'm still the same alpha. If you're talking about changing as far as my dreams, the things that I believe in, the things that I want for myself, the things that I want for people around me, absolutely, and this program, 100% contributed to that. The things that I think about now I did not used to think about the things that I dream about now and what I want to become. I'm interested in going to law school in the next two years. These dreams are something that YPEI gave to me.
WSHU: You haven't changed, but your possibilities have changed.
AJ: Absolutely.
