Potential Second Lady Gwen Walz advocates for education in prisons
Gwen Walz, wife of Kamala Harris’s pick for Vice President, is a strong supporter of education for incarcerated people. Her advocacy started when she was an undergraduate at Bard College and has continued throughout her career as an educator and in her role as the First Lady of Minnesota.
USA Today reports on how the potential Second Lady and retired public school teacher actively champions scholarly opportunities for people in prison:
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 Walz’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.”
