By Kim Glovas

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – Miss America appeared with the Pennsylvania Prison Society yesterday at City Hall. The topic: the effects of parental incarceration on children. Miss America is one of those children.

Laura Kaeppeler, Miss America 2012, talked about her experiences as a child of an incarcerated father. Her father went to prison when she was 17 for a white collar crime, which made headlines in her hometown and across the state of Wisconsin.

“None of my friends could relate to the isolation, to the embarrassment, to the shame of a public scandal in my community that filtered through the newspapers, on the radio stations and on the TV — on news stations across the state.”

She is now affiliated with the Dream Academy, an organization that works with other children of parents in prison or jail. Kaeppeler says that adversity does not have to define those children, and they can have full and productive lives and succeed.