Biography 

Family and Early LIfe

Jack S Griswold was born on November 17th, 1986 in Overland Park KS. From K-12, he attended public schools. He grew up hearing about schools like St Thomas Aquinas and Bishop Miege and the various private elementary-middle schools that fed into them. Griswold also grew up hearing about how smaller communities outside of Johnson County were struggling to provide their children with the same quality public education that he was getting in the Shawnee Mission School District. After graduating from High School, Griswold paid his way through college and law school at the University of Kansas, incurring thousands of dollars of debt to attend. Despite academic scholarships and grants, college was still too much to pay for merely by working a job during the summer and in-between classes. He often wondered about all the potential of college grads being wasted spending time and money paying back student loans to the government. In college, Griswold met his girlfriend and eventual wife, and together they would have a family of three children. Despite the lack of any real exposure to the LGBT community growing up during the 90s as a straight man living in the Midwest, equal Civil Rights protection for gender and sexual minorities is now a personal issue for Griswold as his children grow up and discover themselves and where they fit in the world.

Career

After earning his JD at The University of Kansas School of Law, Griswold began a career as a public defender representing citizens from all over Douglas County, from farmers to undergrads. He quickly began to notice how dysfunctional the judicial system was (and is), despite the generally good intentions held by the broad majority of the individuals that comprise it. Griswold witnessed firsthand the magnetic pull that the broken criminal justice system had on many of his clients. Regular working-class people who make a single mistake that they can’t pay for in cash are sucked into a massive whirlpool of fines, jail time, job loss, and a self-perpetuating rinse-repeat cycle of criminality and poverty. Griswold came to realize that this insidious dysfunction was the result of two things: self-righteous tough-on-crime legislators and their corporate overlords that pay to keep prisons full. As a public defender, Griswold personally represented individuals who would be locked up for years as a result of nonviolent, low-level crimes that often involved either addiction to drugs or economic dependence on dealing marijuana to pay bills after losing a job. On a platform of criminal justice reform and public education, Griswold entered the race for the 2012 mayoral election of Lawrence after seeking a more impactful way to make a positive difference in the lives of the town he had grown to love. Griswold won a seat on the Lawrence City Commission and from amongst its members was voted head of the commission and thus the Mayor of Lawrence. As mayor, Griswold has been met with little cooperation and at times active opposition from the Sunflower State Administration in Topeka. His efforts to increase funding initiatives for public education and decriminalize marijuana have been repeatedly stymied or undermined by the state government. It has recently become clear that his ability to help the communities he cared about would be null and void until a change is made at the state level. Though he has done much to balance the city’s budget and give Lawrence an economic and environmental jumpstart on the 21st century, Griswold will not be seeking reelection in 2020 as he has entered the race for Kansas Governor - still - on a platform of public education and criminal justice.

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