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.
