COMPAS SPECIAL EVENT: Piper Kerman

Bringing her message to Ohio State in this free talk and Q&A presented as part the university’s COMPAS program, Piper Kerman will speak about her own experiences in prison and shed light on the wide-ranging collateral damage of America’s criminal justice practices—particularly on family stability, women, children, and minorities.

Piper Kerman is the author of Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison (Spiegel & Grau), a bestselling book that has been adapted by Jenji Kohan into an Emmy and Peabody Award–winning original series for Netflix. A hit TV show wasn’t Piper Kerman’s goal when she wrote her memoir about her 13 months in the Danbury Federal Correctional Institution, but its success has led to a life of advocacy for criminal justice reform.

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. There are 2.2 million people in the nation’s prisons and jails—a 500% increase over the last 40 years disproportionately affecting people of color. During this time the number of incarcerated women has increased by more than 700%. Though many more men are imprisoned than women, the rate of growth for female imprisonment has outpaced men by more than 50% between 1980 and 2014. According to sentencingproject.org, there are now 1.2 million women under the supervision of the criminal justice system.

Kerman is the recipient of Harvard's Humanist Heroine Award (2015), as well as the Constitutional Commentary Award from The Constitution Project (2014) and John Jay College's Justice Trailblazer Award (2014). She has testified before Congressional Committees and been invited to present on reentry issues at The White House. She has lectured to hundreds of audiences across the US ranging from justice reform groups, corrections professionals, universities, policymakers, and business leadership events.

A series of year-long conversations on morality, politics, and society, Ohio State’s COMPAS program hopes to promote sustained reflection on the ethical challenges that unify various projects within the university’s Discovery Themes Initiative.

Cosponsored by Ohio State’s Honors and Scholars program, Criminal Justice Research Center, Department of Sociology, Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, College of Social Work, and the Wexner Center for the Arts.