THE YALE INSTITUTE ON INCARCERATION AND PUBLIC SAFETY
At the Yale Institute on Incarceration and Public Safety (YIIPS), we are working to reimagine what public safety means in American life. Rooted in interdisciplinary scholarship and sustained through partnerships with communities, our work unfolds across four interlocking pillars:
Education: Developing accessible research and civic learning tools that empower system-impacted communities, students, and the broader public to think critically about law, democracy, and safety.
Advocacy: Reconceptualizing legal strategies as a means of structural repair and restoration, ensuring outcomes that are fair and effective.
Reform: Advancing evidence-based approaches that translate into durable institutional and policy change, improving the equity and accountability of legal systems.
Partnerships: Collaborating with key stakeholders and communities to motivate, inspire, and embolden participation in confronting urgent, often intractable challenges.
At YIIPS, we believe in Justice for Everybody: in building a democracy resilient enough to confront its own failures, combat inequality, and open broader pathways to education, growth, opportunity, and civic life. Justice must remain the measure of a society’s fidelity to its deepest constitutional principles and to the rights of all.
As we expand and build on our collaborations with the Hutchins Center at Harvard University—where the intellectual foundations of YIIPS first took shape—we carry that vision forward at Yale, deepening engagement with incarcerated individuals and widening our reach across the nation.
OUR INITIATIVES
EDUCATION
Democratic resilience depends on knowledge, education, and civic engagement for everybody.
As it stands:
Over 2 million people are incarcerated in the U.S.
10,000 people are released from state and federal prisons each week
650,000 people return to their communities annually
Lack of access to education, job training, and reentry resources leaves many people insufficiently supported after incarceration, diminishing civic participation, eroding economic stability, and perpetuating cycles of structural disadvantage. These barriers extend beyond individual opportunity, weakening public safety and depleting the social capital necessary for collective resilience.
Inside Knowledge is a bold and necessary intervention in the landscape of carceral education and civic engagement. It brings the rigor of scholarship into dialogue with the moral clarity of lived experience, reaching those most directly impacted by the carceral state. Delivered through Edovo—the leading digital education platform in the U.S. prison system—the curriculum provides incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals with access to a wide-ranging body of multimedia content that confronts the most urgent questions of justice, accountability, and democratic possibility.
Inside Knowledge
Spanning lectures, conversations, symposia, podcasts, and artistic works, Inside Knowledge is about the transmission of information, the cultivation of intellectual empowerment, and the deepening of historical understanding. It invites incarcerated learners to imagine themselves not as passive subjects of punitive systems but as thinkers, critics, and architects of alternative futures. With content rooted in area studies, community organizing, self-help traditions, and academic inquiry of the highest order, the project advances a democratic pedagogy forged in struggle. In convening this archive and extending its reach behind prison walls, YIIPS makes a clear statement: that education, pursued in solidarity and with seriousness of purpose, can be a form of resistance, a practice of repair, and a source of democratic resilience.
Recently, at Valley State Prison in Chowchilla, California, we witnessed firsthand the importance of widening access to education, civic learning, and creative expression within carceral settings. By opening pathways for voice, dialogue, and creation, our programming fosters intellectual diversity, strengthens the fabric of public safety, and advances the prospects for fuller democratic participation. Read more about the event in the All of Us Or None August 2025 newsletter.
ADVOCACY
At YIIPS, advocacy means developing legal strategies that move beyond case-by-case remedies toward outcomes that are fair in principle and effective in practice. By engaging history, empirical research, and the lived realities of system-impacted communities, we design interventions that confront entrenched inequities and create lasting change. Advocacy, in this sense, is not only a mode of defense but an instrument of structural repair and restoration. It is the mending of institutions, the renewal of communities, and the strengthening of the democratic commitments that bind them together.
Challenging Discrimination in the Law Project
As part of its educational and policy mission at Yale, the Institute houses the Challenging Discrimination in the Law Program (CDLP), an interdisciplinary initiative that convenes law students, doctoral candidates, and data scientists to co-author expert declarations in litigation challenging racially discriminatory laws. CDLP bridges legal advocacy, historical research, and quantitative analysis to illuminate the origins and consequences of federal statutes whose burdens fall disproportionately on communities of color. Drawing on government archives and empirical datasets, the program builds a deeper record of legislative intent and disparate impact—resources too often neglected in traditional legal advocacy. By integrating empirical methods with archival legal history, CDLP equips students with the tools to contest discriminatory statutes and envision a more just legal framework.
Already, CDLP has partnered with federal defender offices, public interest organizations, and academic experts to develop case-specific declarations and train students in methods of legal history, data science, and litigation strategy. For students, it provides a rigorous, hands-on experience that fuses deep intellectual inquiry with real-world impact—offering a rare opportunity in legal education to apply historical and empirical tools directly in the pursuit of social justice. Participants also receive specialized training in archival research and empirical analysis.
The program’s approach emerged through a series of collaborations, beginning with an examination of the origins of 18 U.S.C. § 860(a), a statute criminalizing drug activity near public housing. Since then, its partnerships have extended to challenges involving firearm enhancements, material support statutes, drug laws, and the misallocation of public funding, all dedicated to bringing to light the hidden histories and unequal consequences that reveal discriminatory intent.
REFORM
Reform at YIIPS is made possible by bringing diverse groups into genuine collaboration and coalition. We work alongside policymakers, scholars, grassroots organizations, activists, and directly impacted communities to design effective alternatives to misguided systems and to advance evidence-based approaches that lead to durable institutional and policy change. This collaborative model not only improves the equity and accountability of legal systems but also fosters civic engagement and strengthens the resilience of democracy itself.
The Fight for a Fairer Juvenile Justice System in Connecticut
In partnership with Connecticut State Representative Kadeem Roberts and a coalition of state and local organizations, YIIPS is leading an effort to establish equitable sentencing practices for young people in Connecticut.
Across the country, outdated sentencing laws have trapped thousands of people in decades-long prison terms for mistakes made as teenagers or young adults—long after science, experience, and common sense tell us they have changed. Connecticut’s statute illustrates the problem clearly: individuals sentenced before October 1, 2005, are eligible for early parole, while those sentenced after that date are not, even when they were the same age at the time of the offense, share comparable records, and have demonstrated the same growth while incarcerated.
This cutoff is not only irrational; it is profoundly unequal. More than 85 percent of those excluded from early parole eligibility in Connecticut are people of color. Black youth in the state are incarcerated at 13.5 times the rate of white youth—the second-highest racial disparity in the nation. Justice should not turn on the accident of a sentencing date, nor should it be shaped by race.
YIIPS is working to change this law in two key ways. First, we seek to raise the age of parole eligibility from under 21 to under 26, in keeping with neurological research and the Supreme Court’s recognition that young people’s brains—and their capacity for change—continue developing well into their twenties. Second, we aim to eliminate the October 1, 2005, cutoff so that all young people are judged by who they are today rather than the year they were sentenced.
The evidence is compelling. States such as Pennsylvania and California, which have enacted similar “second-look” laws, report extremely low rates of reoffense among those granted early parole. In Connecticut, taxpayers spend more than $62,000 annually to incarcerate a single person—funds that could instead support education, mental health care, housing, and reentry programs proven to reduce crime and strengthen public safety. Releasing even a modest number of eligible individuals would save the state millions each year while reinforcing families and communities.
Most importantly, this reform affirms the possibility of redemption. Consider YIIPS’s own Director of Community Outreach, Maurice Blackwell. Sentenced to sixty years in prison at age nineteen, Maurice was released after serving twenty-five years as a result of earlier juvenile justice reforms. He transformed his life, earning a college degree in prison, mentoring others, and returning home as a community leader. The current law denies hundreds of young people like Maurice that same opportunity—for no reason other than a date on the calendar.
Connecticut now has the chance to lead the nation in making its justice system fairer, safer, and more humane. Eliminating the sentencing cutoff and raising the age of parole eligibility are essential steps toward that future.
PARTNERSHIPS
LIBERATION LIVE!
At YIIPS, we are proud to partner with Liberation Live!, a visionary initiative that began inside Connecticut prison classrooms when students in “Readings in African American Studies” imagined turning their coursework into a night of collective art, scholarship, and resistance for their college community. What began as a single showcase has grown into a movement: live performances, a Book Garden that sends reading materials to incarcerated students whose education has been disrupted, and a newsletter linking communities inside and outside prison walls through shared texts and ideas.
At the heart of this work is the Liberation Live! Zine, created and curated by incarcerated students themselves. This quarterly publication captures poetry, essays, artwork, and testimony that expose inhumane prison conditions while centering the voices of directly impacted people as catalysts for change. The zine not only documents injustice but also declares its refusal to let these realities remain hidden. It bears witness to confinement’s human costs—not only for incarcerated individuals, but also for their families, loved ones, and communities—and mobilizes readers, policymakers, and the public toward reform.
For YIIPS, supporting Liberation Live! means amplifying the stories, insights, and visions of those most affected by mass incarceration. These creative works do more than describe injustice; they spark collective imagination about what justice, education, and community could look like beyond prison walls. By bringing these experiences into classrooms, public forums, and policy conversations, we help build a movement where art and scholarship fuel action, insisting that society cannot ignore calls for dignity and systemic change.
Carceral Studies Journalism Guild
The Carceral Studies Journalism Guild (CSJG) is transforming how stories of life behind bars are told and heard. With support from YIIPS, CSJG is democratizing free speech by centering the anonymized and uncensored testimony of justice-impacted witnesses, enabling incarcerated journalists to curate an accurate historical record of mass incarceration.
This growing network of journalists—composed of incarcerated college students and graduates across multiple correctional facilities—navigates censorship, security restrictions, and the structural barriers designed to silence them. Armed with whatever tools are available, from DOC-issued tablets to limited-access laptops—or sometimes nothing at all—CSJG members embody a “by any means necessary” ethos to document and share their experiences, exposing the realities of confinement to audiences beyond the prison walls.
Through its partnership with YIIPS, CSJG also contributes to the Inside Knowledge | Carceral Studies Archive, a growing digital repository preserving testimonies, essays, and creative works by incarcerated authors for scholars, practitioners, and the public. Together, this work ensures that the voices of those living through mass incarceration are not only heard but shape how history, policy, and public memory record the carceral state.
In July 2025, CSJG hosted the Inside Knowledge Journalism Symposium at Valley State Prison in partnership with YIIPS, convening more than 170 participants for panels, performances, and workshops co-led by incarcerated journalists, faculty, and artists. Projects like My Teachable Moment—a first-person documentary series directed by CSGJ Journalist Dominick J. Porter and produced by CSJG founder Ghostwrite Mike—demonstrate the power of storytelling as resistance.
Inequality is not an abstraction but a lived condition, shaping the boundaries of freedom and safety in American life. Our charge is not only to study these inequities and their consequences, but to ask what kind of society becomes possible when public safety is reimagined as a collective responsibility. The Institute’s work rests on the conviction that scholarship, when joined with lived experience and community knowledge, can unsettle entrenched structures and chart paths toward repair. By convening students, practitioners, defenders, and directly impacted communities, we aim to generate ideas that move beyond diagnosis—ideas that widen access to justice, sharpen the demand for accountability, and call institutions to their highest purpose. We insist on a future where justice is not conditional or deferred, but shared.
The Institute’s work is animated by a conviction that scholarship, when tethered to lived experience, can help shape institutions worthy of the people they serve. In convening students, practitioners, and communities around questions of law, democracy, and safety, we seek to generate knowledge that will not remain enclosed in the academy but move urgently into the world. This knowledge expands the circle of belonging and sharpens the call for accountability. And it carries a conviction: there can be no such thing as justice that is conditional or deferred. Justice must be shared, practiced, and renewed—an inheritance indispensable to the survival of democracy.
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