Max Kenner is the founder and director of Bard Prison Initiative which he launched 25 years ago. At Bard College, he is Vice President for Institutional Initiatives and advisor to the President on Public Policy and College Affairs. Currently, he sits on the New York State Council on Community Justice. His awards are many: JFK Presidential Library's New Frontier Award and the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in Education. B.P.I. has been featured on "60 Minutes", PBS News Hour, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post and the docuseries "College Behind Bars" by Ken Burns which was shown on PBS. This 4 part documentary is the inspiring, deeply human story of men and women struggling to earn college degrees while in prison for serious crimes.

Elias Beltran graduated from B.P.I. in 2017 having been incarcerated for 29 1/2 years. He earned a B.A. in Literature and the Humanities. He is now a PhD candidate at Cornell University. He has been a writing fellow with Bard's MicroCollege at the Brooklyn Public Library as well as at the Harlem Children's Zone and at Cornell for the English Language Support Organization (ELSO). He continues studying Mandarin Chinese. He is also a T.A. at Cornell, teaching a class on Crime and Punishment. He was awarded a prize given to Teaching Assistants at Cornell. In the Fall of 2025, he will be teaching at Albion Correctional Facility for Women, a prison in upstate New York. At the age of 16, Elias was sentenced to 30 years-to-life.

BPI on 60 Minutes: https://bpi.bard.edu/news-stories/news/bpi-on-60-minutes/

Max Kenner with Deidre Faughey: https://bpi.bard.edu/news-stories/news/max-kenner-with-deirdre-faughey/

Plus, you can find a lot more about BPI here: https://bpi.bard.edu/news-stories/

This podcast is proudly sponsored by the Innocence Project of Florida. Visit www.floridainnocence.org for more information.