Real Change News | Change Agent: Ari Kohn

November 12, 2008
Vol: 15 No: 47

Change Agent

Change Agent: Ari Kohn

by: Amy Besunder

He helps smart people get the schooling they need to refashion themselves.

Ari Kohn, Change Agent of the Year.

Photo by: Sherry Loeser , Contributing Photographer

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Even as the United States leads the world in both the number and percentage of its citizens in detention, it offers scant help to those who, after serving their time, need to repurpose their lives. About 8,400 people are released each year from Washington state’s correctional institutions; most just get $40 and a scheduled appointment with their community corrections officer. But a fortunate few have a shot at higher education.

Ari Kohn is founder and director of the Post Prison Education Program, which since 2005 has granted scholarships to smart and eager felons leaving the state’s custody and entering college or vocational training. Along with money for school comes what Kohn says is the main determinant of a newly released ex-con’s success: intensive mentoring to keep them out of trouble.

Kohn has an eight-inch stack of paperwork by applicants fully qualified for help who, for lack of money, won’t get it. Like the state’s public universities, “really qualified people get turned away,” he says. Unlike those schools, “if we turn someone away, it may mean their lives go down the tubes.”

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