She's the woman behind the best-selling memoir and hit Netflix series Orange Is The Black, but there's a lot more to Piper Kerman than pop culture hits.
Spending 12 months behind bars on money-laundering charges led to her shining a light on the experiences of prisoners in women's jails in the US.
The TV adaptation of her story has been seen by over 13 million people and not only changed Kerman's idea of justice, but led to important conversations about institutionalised racism and the effectiveness of incarceration.
"I think that prisons and jails have been used as tools of control over certain communities for a long, long time," she says.
"If you look at the role books of women who used to be incarcerated in the 1800s, it's all Irish women.
"And today if you look at New York state prisons, they're of course filled up with women of colour, Latino women, African American women.
"I think that prisons and jails have been used as tools of control over certain communities for a long, long time"
"The other factor is class: regardless of colour, policing and prosecution is targeted at poor people. In the United States eighty per cent of people who are accused of a crime - not necessarily convicted of a crime but accused of a crime - those people are too poor to afford a lawyer to defend them in court."
Kerman was kept in three different facilities during her time in prison and witnessed - as well as experienced - numerous cruelties inflicted on inmates by the system.
One of them in particular was the number of pregnant women in prison, most of whom were forced to remain handcuffed during labour before then being separated from their babies.
"It was devastating," Kerman says.
"It's just incredibly punitive and that's really what we return to when we talk about the American way of criminal justice is that it's incredibly, harshly punitive with very little thought on what the ripple effect of the punitiveness will be.
"Two thirds of women in the system are not there for a serious crime of violence, but rather for a drug offence, a property crime, a low-level crime, prostitution.
"What American prison and jails do not do is rehabilitate or restore people."
