Friday Keynote - Joseph Shapiro

As a Correspondent on NPR’s Investigations Unit, Joe Shapiro writes stories for NPR’s popular news shows that uncover injustices and policy failures—and then have impact. After his 2021 stories exposed how states take the Social Security checks of foster youth, who then leave foster care broke, 31 states and municipalities ended or modified the practice. A series on campus sexual assault (2010) led to new Obama Administration guidance to universities and a series on the epidemic of sexual assault of people with intellectual disabilities (2018) led to laws in several states. Another series exposed a little-known practice of prisons to put two men into tiny “double-cell solitary confinement”—locked down 23 or 24 hours a day in a cell the size of a parking space—and how that lead to a rise in prisoner-on-prisoner violence and killings. As a result, the federal government closed units at two prisons (2016, 2022). Shapiro’s stories on the way rising court fines and fees create an unequal system of justice for the poor (2014) created an early understanding of the rise of “modern day debtors’ prisons”. Stories with on the questionable science used to convict people of “shaken-baby syndrome” (2012) helped free two people from prison. Shapiro is known for his ground-breaking reporting on disability and is the author of “No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement” (1993), considered a “classic” of disability literature. For NPR, a series on the failure of the states and federal government to provide home and community based long-term care (2010) exposed the growing number of young people living in nursing homes. And his story on a quadriplegic teen stuck in a hospital for six years pushed officials in North Carolina to find attendant and nursing staff and an apartment for her (2024, 2025). Shapiro switched from print to radio reporting when he came to NPR in November 2001. He spent nine years on NPR’s Science Desk, covering health, aging, disability and children’s and family issues, including the mental and physical health issues of injured veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2010, he joined NPR’s newly formed Investigations Unit. Among honors for his investigative journalism, Shapiro received Peabody, duPont-Columbia, Polk, Robert F. Kennedy, Edward R. Murrow, Sigma Delta Chi and other awards and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Before coming to NPR, Shapiro worked at U.S. News & World Report as a social policy reporter, the magazine’s Rome bureau chief, politics reporter, White House correspondent and congressional reporter. He lives in Washington, D.C., where he grew up, and is a graduate of Carleton College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.