When Max Kenner met Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s wife Gwen more than a decade ago, he immediately knew he’d found an ally. A former teacher like her then-Congressman husband, Gwen Walz, wanted to know everything about Kenner’s initiative to educate prisoners in New York state.
And now that Tim Walz has been picked by Vice President Kamala Harris as her running mate in her bid for the White House, there could be a member of the second family with the greatest commitment yet to prison education.
Kenner founded the Bard Prison Initiative in 1999 as an undergrad at Bard College, a liberal arts college located in the Hudson Valley, after a 1994 federal ban on Pell Grant eligibility for incarcerated students and a 1995 New York state ban on Tuition Assistance Program decimated in-prison education.
Over the past decade, Kenner met with Walz numerous times to discuss access to higher education in prison, he said.
“She was a devoted Midwestern public school teacher who approached education without prejudice or presumption about what kind of students might achieve what kinds of things and a real optimism for all kinds of students,” Kenner recalled. “She also had a real frustration, or even feeling of disappointment, of how much we’ve failed in this country to create real educational opportunities for so many people, particularly access to college.”
With Gwen Walz as a “champion” of higher education opportunities for incarcerated people, that became a major part of Governor Waltz’s criminal justice agenda, said Kenner.
As first lady of Minnesota, she toured state prisons, held regular calls with leading Corrections Department officials on strategic planning, chaired a task force on recidivism and helped recruit an assistant commissioner to install a new college curriculum behind prison walls.
“I think it’s a crucial conversation to have,” Gwen Walz said in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio in 2019. “I’m convinced that people are looking for ways to address all kinds of different issues within corrections and within criminal justice.”
On such program in Minnesota is the TREC (Transformation and Reentry Through Education and Community), a collaboration between Minneapolis College, Metro State University, University of Minnesota, and Lino Lakes Correctional Facility that was started in 2021.
In an interview with PBS in 2019, she summed up her motivation to help educate incarcerated people this way:
“Education is transformational. And I believe that in every sense of the word,” she said. And if we’re going to solve problems, we have to look at real ways to solve problems. And education is a real predictor of not going back to prison.”
According to the Bard Prison Initiative, recidivism is less than 4% for all students who are enrolled, and 2.5% for graduates.
Walz was governor in 2020 when the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer sparked months of racial justice protests nationwide. He has been criticized for his handling of the riots in the initial days by Republicans, who say he didn’t act fast enough to deploy the National Guard. In 2023, Walz signed into law a major criminal justice reform bill including elimination of juvenile life without parole, the restriction of probation terms to five years or less and the creation of an Office of Restorative Practices.
Gwen Walz, whose first public event as first lady of Minnesota was a rally for restoring voting rights for people convicted of felonies after they’d served their sentences, is widely viewed as a close politcial advisor to the governor. She even keeps an office in the Minnesota State Capitol — a first for a first spouse in the state.
On Tuesday, after he was introduced by Harris as her running mate at a rally in Philadelphia, Walz told the crowd he couldn’t wait for America to get to know his wife, a 29-year public school educator.
“Don’t ever underestimate teachers,” he said.
Restoration of pell grant for incarcerated students
From 1999 to 2020, all college programs in New York prisons through Bard were funded privately and the initiative was limited in scope due to financial constraints.
In 2020, Congress under the Trump administration reinstated Pell grants for incarcerated people enabling a wider adoption of the program nationwide.
According to a RAND Corporation study, inmates who participate in correctional education programs had a 43% lower chance of recidivating than those who did not.
“There was a real bipartisan consensus on the issue,” Kenner said. “The restoration of Pell for people in prison made real educational opportunity possible in prisons in New York, Minnesota, and red and blue states all across the country.”
Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy is a White House correspondent for USA TODAY. You can follow her on X, formerly Twitter, @SwapnaVenugopal
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