Jennifer Ortiz, associate professor of criminology, was recently honored by the American Society of Criminology for her tireless work supporting and advocating for formerly incarcerated individuals.
She received the 2024 Division on Critical Criminology and Social Justice Praxis Award at a ceremony on November 14, 2024, at the ASC Annual Meeting in San Francisco, California.
The award honors an individual’s unique achievements in activism, commitment, persuasion, scholarship, service, and teaching in areas that have made a significant impact on the quality of justice for underserved, underrepresented, and otherwise marginalized populations.
Ortiz has worked to help individuals who have been disenfranchised and advocated for their behalf. For four years, she served as president of the New Albany Indiana Human Rights Commission, investigating complaints of discrimination.
Additionally, she helped raise over $1 million for Freed From Within, a non-profit transitional living facility that provides men with skills to successfully reenter society post-incarceration.
Ortiz’s academic research involves prisoner re-entry, but her focus is squarely on education.
“Education is the strongest factor we have to actually lower recidivism,” she says. Education, she explains, is both educating incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people as well as educating the general public about what can and should be done to create change.
She has presented to the White House Domestic Policy Council and the U.S. Department of Labor Women’s Bureau, among others.
“I do my best to try and bring all of what I’m seeing to places with people who can make change and can do something with it,” she says. “The policymakers.”
Ortiz serves as chair of the Division of Convict Criminology of the ASC, where she established a travel scholarship to bring formerly incarcerated graduate students to the ASC conference where they can share their lived experience with professionals in the field.
Additionally, she established a mentorship program that pairs formerly incarcerated students with mentors to help them deal with the stigma associated with having been in prison. Ortiz is currently mentoring a formerly incarcerated person who is now a student at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
— Emily W. Dodd ’03