Harvard's debate team won the world championship in 2014 and the national championship in 2015, but lost to a team at the Eastern New York Correctional Facility , a maximum-security state prison. The debate program at Eastern is part of the Bard Prison Initiative , which teaches classes in six prisons across New York "to redefine the relationship between educational opportunity and criminal justice."The topic was "Public schools in the United States should have the ability to deny enrollment to undocumented students." The inmates argued the affirmative , despite disagreeing with it.Graduates of the Bard Prison Initiative have a recidivism rate less than 5 percent of other prisoners in New York.