A native of the Washington, D.C. area, Ariel Werner is currently a proud resident of Fort Greene, Brooklyn. She graduated from Brown University in May 2009, having devoted her four years in Rhode Island to learning about the nation’s criminal justice system and fighting for change through policy advocacy, direct service in the offender and ex-offender communities, and grassroots political action.

In 2006, she served as Student Coordinator of the RI Right to Vote Campaign, a ballot initiative that restored voting rights to 15,000 individuals on parole and probation. She received a C. V. Starr Public Service Fellowship in 2007 to work at the RI Family Life Center for ex-offenders and an Arthur Liman Public Interest Law Fellowship in 2008 to work with the RI Office of the Public Defender. At Brown, she coordinated Space in Prison for the Arts and Creative Expression (SPACE)—an organization through which students facilitate arts and writing workshops for inmates at the RI Adult Correctional Institution—and wrote a Political Science Honors Thesis on recent developments in congressional criminal justice policy making.

She is currently serving as a paralegal specialist for the Business and Securities Fraud division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York and hopes to attend law school within a few years.