Revenge to Repair

What if the systems we built to protect us are the very ones causing the most harm? Attorney, restorative justice advocate, and policy advisor at Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS),  Sia Henry joins Mary Schaub for an unflinching examination of the American criminal legal system.  The system doesn't heal harm. It relocates it, multiplies it, and sends it back into communities more concentrated than before.

But this episode isn't only about what's broken. It's about what's possible when we ask a different question — not "how do we punish?" but "how do we repair?" From New Zealand's indigenous-rooted restorative justice model to Norway's open prisons, from the radical promise of psychedelic-assisted therapy to a man walking out of prison for the first time able to read a grocery store label, Sia maps a landscape of alternatives that are cheaper, more humane, and demonstrably more effective. And she connects it all to something more intimate: the micro-moments in every life where we choose exile or encounter, punishment or presence.

 Key Topics

✅Accountability vs punishment (and why the distinction matters)

✅How incarceration relocates harm and destabilizes communities

✅Trauma, ACEs, hypervigilance, and survival adaptations

✅Psychedelic-assisted therapies as a compressed path to healing

✅Education and healthcare as public safety infrastructure

✅Interdependence vs individualism as a root cultural fracture

Key Takeaways

💡Punishment isn’t accountability. Repair requires understanding harm, making amends, and changing future behavior.

💡Incarceration compounds trauma. It harms families and communities, then returns people with fewer resources and more wounds.

💡Systems protect themselves. Even superior models face institutional resistance when budgets and headcount are at stake.

💡Healing scales. When individuals heal, families and communities stabilize—public safety improves upstream.

Memorable Quotes

🎤“No part of the system is about healing… it’s purely about punishment.” — Sia Henry

🎤“When we say we want that person held accountable, what we’re really saying is that we want punishment… revenge.” — Sia Henry

🎤“A child who’s not embraced by its village will burn it down to feel its warmth.” — African proverb, cited by Sia Henry

Resources & Links

🔗MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies): https://maps.org/

🔗Mount Tamalpais College (San Quentin): https://www.mttamcollege.edu/

🔗Jonathan Haidt — The Righteous Mind: https://jonathanhaidt.com/books/the-righteous-mind/

🔗Portugal drug decriminalization (overview): https://transformdrugs.org/blog/drug-decriminalisation-in-portugal-setting-the-record-straight

Keywords  

Restorative justice, criminal legal system, mass incarceration, accountability vs punishment, trauma, ACEs, PTSD, recidivism, abolition, racial justice,

Disclaimer:

***The information, opinions, and recommendations presented in this Podcast are for general information only and any reliance on the information provided in this Podcast is done at your own risk. This Podcast should not be considered professional advice.***

Credits: Written, produced and hosted by: Mary Schaub. Theme song written by: Mary Schaub

Contact: FractalsofChange@outlook.com  

Website: M. Schaub Advisory (MSA)

Transcript

Mary Schaub (00:00)
The American justice system is a harm multiplier, not a harm reducer.

Sia Henry (00:21)
Yes, 100 % agree. Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, so our criminal legal system, as I think more and more people are coming to fully understand and grasp, is that our criminal legal system was really born out of slavery, right? So slavery supposedly ended, and then there was kind of scramble to create a new system to subjugate Black and then also Brown and Indigenous people. so

That's really where we started from. I have spent years in prisons and jails doing conditions of confinement work, representing ⁓ incarcerated people, some of our most vulnerable incarcerated people, people with serious mental health issues, serious medical conditions, physical disabilities, ⁓ developmental disabilities. And...

Being in those spaces, generally speaking, but then especially being in those spaces to serve and support and fight for the rights of the most vulnerable people, people at the high risk of sexualized violence and neglect and other forms of violence, it is so clear. I mean, that's why my initial response was yes, 100%. It is so clear that no part of the system is about healing. No part of the system is about true accountability. It's purely about punishment.

And unfortunately, what's happened in this country is that the word accountability has somehow become synonymous with punishment, but people don't necessarily make that connection. And so when we hear about something harmful or scary that has happened in our community, the knee-jerk reaction is to say that person needs to be held accountable, which really ignores first all the reality that

we can't actually hold anyone accountable but ourselves. So true accountability is supporting someone in understanding the harm that they've caused and actually, apologizing for that harm and then doing what they can to make things right. And then also doing their best to not engage in that type of harm moving forward. So really when we say we want that person held accountable, what we're really saying is that we want punishment because what we really want is revenge, which is a very understandable, very, very, very understandable reaction.

⁓ But we're losing the reality and like the countless of studies that have shown that punishment doesn't work to actually resolve underlying or to address underlying behavior. And so absolutely we have a system that has nothing to do with healing.

Mary Schaub (02:45)
it did occur to me that we use accountability and punishment so interchangeably that we don't even think about the definitions. And also that we're fairly disconnected from our own thoughts about how it makes us feel better. We know from neurobiology that humans are wired to scan for threat.

and from social psychology that our sense of justice is often driven by instinct before reason. Thinking of Jonathan Haight's work, for example, which shows how moral judgments tend to arise emotionally and only later get rationalized. So it makes sense that punishment can feel satisfying at a visceral level, but you already are citing that we do now have solid evidence that this instinctive approach

fails. It's actually not effective. even taking, and I'm going to check myself throughout because I do have a bleeding heart. My dad used to say, have a bleeding heart. if I think from a business consultant, or I put my sort of career hat on, is that the outcomes don't work. Not only is this a moral failure, but it's actually an ineffective approach to actually reduce harm over time.

Sia Henry (03:40)
same.

Yeah, definitely. mean, and you're absolutely right. There's that, there's that, again, that like knee jerk reaction, that instinct of punishment, revenge, put them away somewhere. But you really have to think it all the way through, right? Because everyone is attached to someone. Everyone, let's say 98 % of people are attached to someone, whether it's they have a child, they have family, they have friends, they have neighbors, they have a community that they're relying to. And so what you're doing, because unless we're just

sending people off into space, we're really just relocating whatever harmful behavior they were engaging in. So we're relocating that harm and putting it behind bars, putting it somewhere where we can't see it. And that's very deliberate that there's a, we've, our correctional facilities have been set up very deliberately where it's very hard for the general public to have any, any like real grasp of what's actually going on in those spaces. We relocated that harm. then we're causing,

And then kind of like that indirect residual harm within that community, right? So for instance, you remove a parent from a home, what happens to those children? And maybe those children have less parental guidance, maybe they end up in the foster care system, which happens, which tends to be a breeding ground for, you child sexual abuse, physical abuse, other forms of violence and neglect, et cetera. You're then traumatizing that young person that is then.

Mary Schaub (05:05)
Mm-hmm.

Sia Henry (05:20)
growing up and going out into the world where they didn't get the support that they needed. And then they're more likely to then engage in their own harmful behavior as a result of the trauma that they experience as a child. So it's just one example of how by removing this person, you're weakening a community. Meanwhile, majority of people who are incarcerated get out at some point. We're not just, thankfully at least, not just giving everyone life without parole sentences.

⁓ And so majority of people are returning to their communities further traumatized than they were before they were incarcerated. mean, there's just countless studies and articles and recounts and now documentaries coming out about how incredibly violent and depraved the environment is in our penal institutions. And so the longer you're in that environment and then you're returning to a community where again, you're further traumatized.

and your economic opportunities, your job opportunities are so severely dwindled. Then you add the fact that you can't qualify for various forms of welfare, for food stamps, for public housing, et cetera, et cetera. And so you're just compounding all of the harm. So yeah, you're just causing more harm.

Mary Schaub (06:39)
I mean, talk about being set up for failure, really. It is a life sentence in that way, We're sort saddling them with a burden that is, I mean, they already came in with challenges and we're just adding more on top.

Sia Henry (06:52)
Exactly, exactly.

Mary Schaub (06:54)
Buckminster Fuller said, don't change systems by fighting the old, you build something better. We've seen other countries rethink their approaches with positive results. So for example, Portugal's shift toward treatment instead of criminalization, Norway and Sweden's emphasis on rehabilitation and reintegration rather than containment. Their recidivism rates are down to around 20 % within three to five years.

In the US, it's 60 to 70%.

Given the long-term data on outcomes like recidivism and public safety, why do you think the US system has been so resistant to experimenting with these models?

Sia Henry (07:39)
Yeah, yeah, it's a deep question. I mean, you know, so I've spent my entire career over a decade in the criminal legal system reform, racial justice, abolition spaces, kind of like the intersection of all those spaces. I think that's a really big question. I think it's a combination of racism and capitalism, kind of just both at their best.

I used to work with a national organization, was a really small team of us, and we were supporting communities around the country in establishing pre-charge restorative justice diversion programs, we were setting up these programs that are based off of a model from New Zealand.

in the eighties, New Zealand's did a report that found that their indigenous Maori people had disproportionately negative outcomes across medical care, mental health, involvement in the criminal legal system. And so one of the reactions, because New Zealand is a very logical place, was they...

They completely transformed their juvenile justice system to reflect indigenous Maori approaches to addressing harm. So we took that model and replicated it for the US and we were working with communities around the country and setting up these diversion programs where, let's say someone, there were specifically four more serious types of harm. So someone in a community engages in harm, assault, burglary, carjacking, robbery, et cetera.

And so they would be arrested, but then instead of being charged with a crime, the DA, their prosecutor's office would send that case to a nonprofit organization in the community that we had trained in restorative justice. And someone from that, organization would meet with the person responsible for causing harm, separately meet with the person harmed or the victim or survivor, and then also meet with their respective loved ones and do a ton of prep work over the course of weeks or months.

and then prepare everyone to come together for a face-to-face conversation where the person, let's say if it was a robbery, where the person who did the robbery had a chance to genuinely apologize and take accountability for what they did. The person harmed, so the person robbed in this instance would have a chance to speak about how that robbery impacted them. Their loved ones would also have a chance to speak. And then at the end of that process, everyone in the room, and again, the only people in the room are the...

Mary Schaub (09:33)
Wow.

Sia Henry (09:56)
one or two facilitators from the organization and then the people directly involved in that harmed and their loved ones. There isn't an attorney, a defense attorney, a judge, jury, a bunch of people who have nothing to do with the situation. At the end of that process, everyone in the room comes up with a plan to support the person responsible for the harm and making things up to the person they harmed, their family, their community, and also themselves.

And it was a very victim or survivor centered process where it was really about what that survivor needed in order to feel as right as, or as whole as possible. so we were working with communities around the country and setting up these programs. And again, significantly lower recidivism rates compared to the rates that you just named. I believe the recidivism rates were around like maybe 13%.

Also significantly cheaper. The entire process literally cost maybe a couple thousand dollars compared to the tens of thousands of dollars it costs to incarcerate a young person or put them on probation or parole. And we were in the process of trying to convince, this is in Alameda County in California, we were trying to convince, the county was diverting at the time about a hundred young people a year to that program and we were trying to convince them to divert closer to about four or 500.

Mary Schaub (10:47)
Wow.

Sia Henry (11:13)
young people and we were, you my supervisor was talking to one of the prosecutors there and he literally said to her, you know, I know that everything your program is doing is much better than what we're doing here in the, you know, prosecutor's office. But if I send more young people through restorative justice, I won't be able to justify my staff, which basically is saying, I understand that this is a better process, it's way better outcomes for everyone involved. However,

I have a budget and that budget allows me to employ a certain number of people. And if I send more cases, then I won't be able to justify continuing to employ a certain number of people. Therefore, I'm going to continue charging children with crimes and putting them in cages and putting them in handcuffs because financially it allows us to maintain our budget. And I feel like that example right there really just kind of answers everything you need to know. mean,

I've been to Norway and Finland and I've taken people on tours of their prisons and jails where about a third of their prisons are considered open, which means that you sleep there at night, but then during the day you can leave and you can go to work and you can go to school. You can interact with your community, visit your family, et cetera. I believe the average sentence between Norway and Finland was like around 18 months or so. And then a life sentence, even a life sentence is,

Mary Schaub (12:20)
Mm-hmm.

Sia Henry (12:38)
about 15 years. And so, and the whole idea and the whole kind of concept around their correctional facilities is that all these people are getting out at some point, probably fairly soon. And so the real punishment is your removal or even just partial removal from society. Not all the other things in the abuse and neglect and torture that comes with being incarcerated and so that and incarcerated in the US. And so while we have you,

we're going to surround you with as many support services and you know the medical care, is the same people on the outside the education system and people that run the library and the facilities are the same people who are also working on the outside. So it's the same level of care and service that you're getting on the outside.

So it's a completely different mindset. Angela Davis said radical just means grasping things at the root or something, I'm paraphrasing. But it's the idea of, it's a difference between societies that see a problem and then come up with a solution that actually goes to address the underlying issue versus a society like the US, which is really more driven.

less so on logic and an understanding of the interconnectedness and the impact of not taking care of large swaths of your population and instead driven by financial incentives

Mary Schaub (14:05)
Wow,

that story, the comment about the budget was really,

It was sort of a gut punch. I was wondering if it had anything to do with the privatization of the prison system. And you brought in a completely different but similar component,

I had a dentist.

and they were always trying to upsell me and cross sell me. And I thought, there's a clear conflict of interest when I'm going to see someone for objective medical advice and they're incented on me being unwell. And I feel like there's something here, which is there's a business model and jobs that are built on this. That the people who are making decisions

Sia Henry (14:38)
Yeah.

Mary Schaub (14:47)
will directly impact their own wealth and prosperity.

Sia Henry (14:51)
Yeah, definitely. mean, like a thousand different thoughts have just ran through my mind and listening to you. I definitely there are entire towns. I think they're called prison towns where their entire economy, like a majority of the town, the people who live in that town work at the local jail or prison. A majority of the prisons in this country are in very rural conservative communities.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I don't think that that's by mistake because the people incarcerated in those facilities are counted towards the census. Even though they can't vote, they're counted as like part of the residents of that very rural conservative community. That's very interesting. You know, people bring up private prisons a lot, which are only, I haven't checked the stats in a while, but only maybe about 18%.

of our incarcerated population are actually in private prisons, which are very problematic for all the reasons you've touched on. But that's not like the issue. I think people kind of jumped to like, yeah, in the private prisons, but even our state and county prisons and jails are equally, I think, as incentivized against healing I'm someone who

genuinely cares about people who are deeply traumatized, who have engaged in harm, because I also understand that we've in a lot of ways created these very kind of black and white distinctions between victim and criminal, right? Completely ignoring the fact that a lot of people who engage in serious harm have themselves been victimized in the past, which for a lot of people is the reason why they're engaging in serious harm. But even if you're someone who

understandably does not care about, incarcerated people, formerly incarcerated people, about people with records. Again, you have to think it all the way through. So if you're living in your part of the city or whatever, and, you know, you have your gated community and, you know, your golf courses and tennis courts and all the beautiful things, and you don't care about the people across town who

are living in a very different environment than you are, living in, let's say, public housing and heavily policed communities. And there's just evidence of the structured violence and systemic racism, just clear evidence of that on the streets. Even if you don't care about those people, you have to understand that when your basic needs are not being met, you are going to do everything you can to get those needs met.

even if that means engaging in harm, robbery, burglary, et cetera, that starts to seep into your beautiful side of the street, your beautiful side of the city. And so even if it's like purely selfish motivations, it still behooves you to care about what's happening in our prisons and jail systems, in our criminal legal system.

And I think people somehow forget about that. I heard someone once say that the US is the most individualistic society that there is. And I think there's a lot of evidence of that. There's a very clear, like, this isn't my problem, you know? And if there are homeless people outside my house, I just want these homeless people gone. Even if that just means moving them over to the next neighborhood or locking them up giving them bus tickets to go to some other state, I don't care what happens to them. I just want them gone.

as opposed to asking, well, what type of community do we have? What type of society do we have when I was in law school years ago, I spent my last semester interning at the Department of Justice I started in January and it was ⁓ Arctic.

below freezing temperatures. And every day, every single morning when I went to work, I would get out the train station and walk across the street to the main justice building. And every single morning I would pass a man who was sleeping on the bench. in below freezing temperatures, like what type of society do we live in where you have the main quote unquote justice building literally across the street from someone sleeping on a bench.

And we've decided that that's okay. And in a country where there's definitely enough wealth and resources for everyone, we've decided that that's okay.

Mary Schaub (18:56)
Again, what's popping into my head, I'm a big animal lover, so I get these emails, you know, it's below zero, you don't let your dogs out. that often you see people extending more kindness to animals. And here I'm in New York and we're in this cold snap right now. It's been terrible. And I think I saw on the news last night that 13 people had passed away due to the cold. And

Sia Henry (19:09)
You

Mary Schaub (19:22)
I wonder if in maybe in the founding of America and this sort of puritanical idea, I feel that there's some sort of defense mechanism happening that's sort of like, they must have done something wrong. Because the idea that like every time I see someone who's unhoused, I think that could be me. And you know, I did not grow up with money. I've had, you know, periods of income.

instability and I think once you've grown up that way, it never leaves you. And so it is never lost on me that that person could be me. And it's a scary and very upsetting and disturbing thought. I forgot what I'd heard. I think it was like, maybe it was, oh, it was a Ram Dass, old Ram Dass lecture where he was talking about a woman who said that she passed someone on the street every day and sometimes she would give a dollar and sometimes she wouldn't.

And she asked herself, why am I not acknowledging this person as a person? And she came to the realization it was because she would ask him to move in with her. And that would not be appropriate or sustainable. But the idea that if we really let in what's happening, it will break our hearts. And I think for some of us, you do this type of work.

Sia Henry (20:26)
Mm.

Mary Schaub (20:45)
I talk about these types of things. We try to make a difference. I think maybe I'm just thinking out loud, I'd love to hear your thoughts, that for some other people that is such a threatening and overwhelming idea. That is so much easier just to say, it's probably drugs, they don't wanna work.

there's been this sort of idea passed down, it's become a narrative that if somebody has tripped and fallen or something is in their way, it must be due to some failing on their end.

and to look at things like systemic racism or how the cards are stacked against certain people would change a narrative that is their entire worldview.

Alan Watts said, punishment treats people as errors instead of processes.

Sia Henry (21:36)
Mmm.

Mary Schaub (21:40)
I'm wondering if we're exiling people instead of repairing them. Like, what came first, the cultural story or the policy choice? Like, how are they feeding on one another if this is some old thinking?

Sia Henry (21:53)
Yeah,

we will do a lot of mental gymnastics and to avoid shame,

for a lot of people, it's really hard to sit with the discomfort of their own personal responsibility. it's one thing to point out all of the ramifications, for instance, of slavery and to say, well, I wasn't personally, I've never personally owned a slave, so this isn't my issue.

It's really easy to say that versus thinking about,

my own personal responsibility. And I think that that's really hard for people to grapple with. And then there's another reality that unfortunately for a lot of people in order to realize real transformative systemic change in our society, a lot of people are going to have to give up resources and power.

And people aren't willing to do that. I mean, especially in a society where if you have made it, whatever that means, you've achieved the American dream, whatever that by messages that tell you, you are solely responsible for having achieved this dream, for having made it. Again, going back to the individualisticness of our society. So you're told that, you you achieved this level and it's because you worked hard and you deserve it.

if you got up here because you worked hard and other people are down here because presumably they just didn't work hard enough then why should you give up your power and resources to benefit these people who are just lazy?

that I think just really keeps and allows us to maintain the status quo that we have now.

Mary Schaub (23:31)
Well, and also to your point in the beginning is really the refusal and denial of seeing our interdependence. Maybe it's founded on, as you're saying, the individualistic and competitive environment where you have to lose in order for me to win. And that's just simply not true. And it's actually the opposite. And there's more than enough for everyone.

Sia Henry (23:38)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mary Schaub (23:59)
I do think that there's this disavowal, like you're saying with the shame and even looking at, we're talking more about it and it's unfortunately some of it's being erased at the moment, but even our historical missteps and failures and moral lapses.

when we don't acknowledge them, we don't integrate them, we don't learn from them. And the US has had a real problem with that. Or if you compare it to, and I do have some friends in Germany, and they would describe, you know, after the war and the generation since, that World War II and the Holocaust is deeply embedded in their education system and their communities, like from kindergarten on.

Here, we have the Thanksgiving narrative, where you have everyone sitting down and I mean, it's just, we don't like to look at those things. And what gets disowned usually comes back in distorted forms. And what I found really interesting going back to your explaining the restorative justice work that you've done is it seems to break that pattern, right? Because traditionally,

Sia Henry (24:50)
Yeah.

Mary Schaub (25:08)
someone gets incarcerated, the victim goes off and deals with whatever, it might make me who's hearing about it on the news feel better, but neither of those parties are actually, they're both disowning their part of the story. And there is no real reckoning except for in the minds of maybe the general public that are going to feel somehow

Sia Henry (25:23)
Exactly.

Mary Schaub (25:34)
viscerally more comfortable and safe. Everyone gets their budgets and their headcount in the process, but neither the victim nor the perpetrator in that instance really got any closure or kind of integrated that experience.

Sia Henry (25:41)
Yeah.

you're exactly right in terms of your characterization of the difference in the processes if you look up a criminal case, it's always US v. Henry or, you know, the state of Georgia or whatever, v. Henry. Henry being the person who caused the harm, victims are just witnesses.

And if a victim is not willing to cooperate, they're just not invited. They're just not told, kept abreast of the trial dates. And in some states, as a result of their not being willing to basically help the prosecution, then it makes it harder for them to access victim services funds and things like that. They don't actually matter in the process.

Mary Schaub (26:33)
I want to shift gears. You mentioned trauma before. Trauma is something we talk about on the show a fair amount and it's become sort of a popular term. And I think the more people learn about it and have broader conversations like the ones we're having, we sort of understand the constellation of trauma and how it has its roots in so many issues that we grapple with. So I came across this

a statistic in my research which said in 2016, so I think it was Yagi et al. found that about 90 % of incarcerated people have significant histories of trauma. And this is abuse, neglect, exposure to violence, chronic instability. And their ACE scores, for those who aren't familiar with ACE, that's the Adverse Childhood Experience Scale. It's a framework that quantifies trauma.

ACE scores were about three to four times higher than the general population. So from a trauma lens, we're not just dealing with bad behavior, but with people whose nervous systems and identities were shaped by environments that required them to have survival level adaptations. So we're responding to trauma as pathology or threat rather than

Sia Henry (27:43)
Hmm.

Mary Schaub (27:54)
what we know it is, which is that it hasn't been healed or ⁓ integrated. I think about, again, if I go back to putting a business consulting hat on it and taking your morals or whatever political leanings you have, from a root cause perspective, this is huge. And if you want to solve a problem, and I'm going to be naive and say, we all want to live in relative peace and harmony. And if that's our...

if that's our shared goal as a society, and we're looking at the root cause of something like we don't want crime, but 90 % of this is correlated with this trauma. Now we can get to prevention. what do you make of us ignoring this critical piece of the puzzle?

Sia Henry (28:39)
my God, so many things. was writing down some of my thoughts so I didn't lose any of them. To me, this is the point.

current and formerly incarcerated people having rates of PTSD and suicidality and substance use disorders similar to war veterans, but we don't talk about it.

I want to say it was the 60s where two psychologists, I believe in New York, who decided that the Black Power movement was both a sign and symptom of schizophrenia in the Black community. And to this day, still to this day, you have Black people, especially Black men, being overdiagnosed with schizophrenia, also being overdiagnosed with bipolar disorder.

I

I had ⁓ a friend

I was having a small gathering at my house and he was saying how even just the way his home is set up where there are mirrors everywhere so we can see all the different parts of his house he's on a constant, you know, he's constantly on alert, constantly on alert. for people who might be looking to kill him or arrest him. And I had said something about like, you know, that's not normal, right? Just being in this constant state of hyper arousal.

all the time is not normal. And he was supposed to be running to the store to get snacks. And he was gone for maybe about 20 minutes and he came back. He didn't have any snacks. And he said, and he never made it to the store. Cause he said, I was just sitting in the car and I, no one had ever said to me that that's not normal. And I was just sitting with that. ⁓ It's the things that our communities have normalized as a result of, just needing to survive.

Mary Schaub (30:07)
Wow.

Sia Henry (30:15)
I have a cousin who was born and raised in Crown Heights in Brooklyn and said, the first time I saw someone get killed, I was seven and I was walking home from school and there was a guy in front of me who had headphones on and someone just came up and shot him point blank and some of his brains got on my coat.

Mary Schaub (30:34)
my god.

Sia Henry (30:34)
And then what

really seemed to have stood out to my cousin was that he was like, I didn't know at the time he could kill someone with such a small gun. And like, that was the thing that stood out to him was just how small the gun was. there's so many stories of that, like especially in the black community of, seeing murder and just being in these constant states that are just not healthy and just not normal.

So then we're saddled with that or we don't have access to mental health services or treatment services. there's an African proverb that someone told me once that says, a child who's not embraced by its village will burn it down to feel its warmth.

Mary Schaub (31:11)
Wow.

Sia Henry (31:11)
in the moments where someone engages in harmful behavior and behavior that we're scared of, that we're mad at, very understandably, we zero in on that behavior and we define people by the worst things that they've ever done. But we don't ask why and we don't ask how did you get here? Because when you're killing people, when you're robbing people, you weren't just born that way. A lot of things have gone wrong and a lot of people and a lot of systems have failed you along the way.

Mary Schaub (31:39)
I wanna shift to hope because I do believe and I'm gonna keep holding onto it, it's why I do this, is like that within the darkness, there's still some light. And if our current approaches to punishment and exile reflect our society's deep need to reject and pathologized our most traumatized citizens, then

Sia Henry (31:43)
Good.

Mary Schaub (32:04)
What do we make of the renewed interest in and support of the psychedelic therapies? Because I think there's something hopeful in this renewed interest.

Sia Henry (32:11)
Yeah.

Definitely. think psychedelics are really interesting in that they kind of help give people themselves back. It's like there was a quote I read recently that was something like, ⁓ do you remember who you were before the world told you who you should be? And I think psychedelics kind of help you do that in a way where, not all the time, but for a lot of people help kind of.

cut through a lot of the nonsense and the noise and just remind you of both who you are and who we are and like how and who we could be as a collective. I think early in the conversation, we were talking more about like capitalism and the financial burden of it all and how a lot of these systems are actually profiting off of people being unwell and psychedelics offer

kind of ⁓ like a reprieve from that. So for instance, if you look at all of the studies and research and stats that are showing that people with things like treatment resistant depression and PTSD and suicidality and all these things are able to go through a psychedelic assisted therapy process that might take a week, might take two weeks between prep and the dosing session and integration, or maybe a couple months of integration who

then after that no longer meet the qualifications for depression, for PTSD, et cetera, and compare that to pharmaceutical companies that just want you to keep taking this one pill every day for rest of your life, right? And so that to me, like that's a glimmer of hope that it's not just kind of something to take the edge off or to treat the symptoms,

but really offering people at least a step in the direction of real sustainable change and real sustainable transformative wellness. And I think the other beautiful thing about psychedelics, obviously there are a number that are manufactured, but there's also a number that are natural. There are a number that...

come from and have a very long history in indigenous communities, in Latinx communities, in African communities. Some of them, like mushrooms, are things that you can technically grow in your house. And to me, that's also really hopeful that it's really kind of returning the ability for us to heal ourselves and heal each other.

Mary Schaub (34:41)
Thank you.

We're a society that's unwell and suffering. And whether it's a big T trauma or a little T trauma, we know now about trauma therapy that it can work. It's relational. It's very difficult. It's expensive.

and it can take many years even if you have the money and the time. And so what we're seeing now with psychedelics is that the outcomes are really, so positive but it's so much more compressed and taking the money out of it. I mean, there are waiting lists for therapists even in cities like New York and LA. And then of course there's just therapy deserts all around the country in rural areas.

So we have a problem there. Insurance doesn't cover much of behavioral health anymore. Even with a decent insurance plan, if you're lucky to have one, it's very, very expensive. And so this offers a real practical way for people to get out from under their suffering. unwell people are expensive to a society.

And so it again, not just because it's the moral and ethical thing to want people to be well, but it benefits us all. And then as you were speaking, I was thinking like sort of my big philosophical hat on, which is everything we've been talking about, about denial and these stories we tell ourselves and all of this kind of stuff. Psychedelics also challenges and breaks open some of those things too.

Sia Henry (35:50)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mary Schaub (36:15)
And

it can really highlight the interdependence and the humanity. It can really lift, I think, the veil on a lot of what keeps us in the dark and keeps us ignorant about what we don't wanna see. And so what's so promising and exciting about it is that it has...

that big impact, big possibility of really shifting our conscious collectively, but then it can also have tremendous impact to veterans coming back from war with PTSD, addictions that are really resistant, depression that's resistant. And those, to your point at the beginning, when you were saying that's not just one person, that's a person who's in a family, a relationship, who has kids,

So there's like a multiplier effect to this healing that is just so exciting.

I think you've written about how access to healing and education is a justice issue. Now you serve on the board of, is it Mount Tamil Pace? Am I saying that correctly?

Sia Henry (37:18)
Timopais, yeah, I was on the board for a number of years.

Mary Schaub (37:22)
it's the country's first tuition-free independently accredited college inside a prison. when people push back and to whether it's free education, therapy, job training for incarcerated people, or even access to the therapies like the ones that MAP supports.

I'm wondering what we collectively believe in society, who is deserving of growth

Sia Henry (37:47)
Mm-hmm.

I love the way you've characterized that and the deservingness of it. again, I understand the maybe like the kind of knee-jerk reaction of,

you know, I had to pay for college or I wasn't able to afford college, but then you're giving these incarcerated people access to, you know, a free college degree, et cetera, et cetera. And I think it's kind of going back to.

Mary Schaub (38:18)
Let's give everyone free college

then, right? Like that's the other thing is like we're pitted against each other. Then you're right, we should all have free college and many, or very low cost college.

Sia Henry (38:22)
Exactly,

Exactly. no, that's exactly right. we have this crab in the barrel mentality that it's like, if you get to have it, then that means I don't get to have it, which isn't actually true. Again, these are things that there are enough resources in this country where we can actually give everyone free or very low cost access to medical care, mental health care, higher education, et cetera.

Yeah, it's

there was an older guy probably in his sixties, maybe even in his seventies, who I think he was getting ready to get out of prison. And I asked him what he was looking forward to. And he literally, what he said to me was, you know, when I was, when I got locked up, I couldn't read and I've since learned how to read since I've been here. And so.

⁓ I'm looking forward to getting out and like walking down the aisle of a grocery store and being able to read all the things. Which both broke, which honestly broke my heart because that's the thing you're looking forward to. But it's also just this reminder that we, a lot of us like take a lot of things for granted. Like I went to, I was in a really great public school system and

Mary Schaub (39:26)
Right.

Sia Henry (39:40)
you know, it's just like all the things that people just simply do not have access to that you would just assume like this is a different country. This isn't the US where we have grown adults who can't read. having.

quality K through 12 education for everyone, quality, community healthcare services, when you give people access to those things, you're really transforming, again, not just individuals, but families and communities

You know, talk about public safety, like we make public safety synonymous with more police, more prisons, more jails, but that, to me, that's real, that's real public safety is making sure people just have access to the basic things that they need to be okay, to be well, you know.

Mary Schaub (40:27)
And by the way, innovation, which we love to talk about here in the US, having really great school systems and affordable university for everyone increases a country's ability to innovate. And you look at places like Romania that have been investing in education and now it's some, mean, the amount of people who are

qualify as programmers or cyber experts is enormous because they collectively decided to make that investment. It benefits us as a country, limiting, as you're saying, the criminal activity on the bottom, but also raising the opportunity for innovation and growth,

having affordable services makes the country stronger.

Sia, you have done so much. I'm just really curious if you're comfortable sharing, how did you get it? Because you're also, I mean, the amount, your resume, all the things that you've been involved in, I'd expect you to be like 90 years old.

Sia Henry (41:11)
Exactly. Yeah.

Mary Schaub (41:23)
How did you get into this? You have just been so prolific and the breadth and quality of the work that you've been doing. What brought you into the space?

Sia Henry (41:33)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think I've just always been really curious. And I've always been like, I was probably a pretty difficult child, like just very hardheaded and stubborn. And just like, if everyone's going to the left and the expectation is that I go to the left, I'm like, well, why is everyone going to the left? What's over there? And if going to the left doesn't make sense to me, then I've always just been like, well, then I'm not going to the left.

Like I haven't been on social media since 2013, which blows people's mind. But I just got to a point where I was like, this seems unhealthy. I'm not doing this anymore. And so I remember in high school, I wrote a paper for some class on the mind of a serial killer, because I was just curious. I was like, how do we have people who behave in this way? This is really strange. Like, what is going on? And so I think there was a curiosity. And then also,

raised by parents that I think just instilled in me just like a very clear moral compass and set of values. And especially my father has lived in Brooklyn my entire life, still lives in the house that I was, my sister and I were literally born in. And, you know, he said that when he first, he lives kind of like in the heart of Brooklyn off of Flatbush by Prospect Park. it was a very different neighborhood decades ago. And when he first bought his house, it had bars over the windows.

And he didn't like that because it felt like he was living like in a cage or something. So we had the bars removed. And you know, and he's never been like a gun person or whatever. And again, it was a very different neighborhood back then. You had people outside selling drugs. And so his way of staying safe was getting to know the community. So to this day, like he's the person who anytime he walks down the street anywhere.

He speaks to everybody. And it didn't matter who it was, if it was someone who looks like they were selling drugs or someone who looked like they were a professor. He spoke to everyone. And over time, people came to know him as like, that's the guy who speaks to people, right? And that's what really made him and kept him safe

I grew up seeing that and I grew up seeing how my father just treats strangers. I mean, it's so interesting how, you I can be walking down the street with no one else around and I pass, you know, an adult with their child and they don't even make eye contact. And I'm like, your child is seeing that. Your child is seeing that you don't have to acknowledge other people's existence or other people's immunity. So I grew up seeing that. And then I had this curiosity and this hardheadedness, went to college, started learning, you know, about

The War on Drugs, I had a class where we read parts of The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. And I had also like befriended some random drug dealers in the community. It's a whole different story. And so again, that also really piqued my curiosity. That was like, what do you mean? We have like basically two kind of completely different systems of justice depending on the color of your skin or the neighborhood or the community you come from.

And so I went straight through from undergrad to law school and at 22 was very naive and like, I'm gonna get all the black people out of the prison and it's gonna be great. And within two weeks of being in law school, I had a professor who said there's morality and then there's the law. And that was really in like kind of unfortunate eye-opening moment for me that was like, okay, so basically our legal system really has nothing to do with morals and values and what's right.

it's based on something else. And so from there, I spent my three years in law school, honestly, really trying to figure out how not to be a lawyer, how to take all this information and not be part of a system that I didn't believe in. I knew I wanted to do criminal legal system reform work, for instance, but all the professors and mentors at my law school were like, well, you have to go be a public defender first and work in the trenches before you can do policy work. But the idea of

working as a public defender to me meant like being part of a system that I don't believe in. Even if it's defending people, I can still defend someone. They still get found guilty and sentenced to 20, 30 plus years in jail and prison. And the excuse or the justification is, well, they had a Harvard trained lawyer representing them. So they had their day in court and this is fair.

And to me, that still didn't feel fair. And so I've just kind of spent my entire career, both trying, like just like kind of forging my own path, but also kind of going back to that Angela Davis quote about what it means to be radical, really trying to understand what is the issue? Like, what is the real issue? And what's the solution? Not like a band-aid or a solution to the symptoms, but

where should I be kind of focusing my energy that's really gonna get to some of those underlying issues.

Mary Schaub (46:22)
You're doing it your way, And I mean, I kind of think that that's where we're at, where we need people who are going to be radical, to think differently, right? Because otherwise, first of all, once you start working in the system, sometimes it's hard to get out once you get in there. And also, yeah, and I'm also imagining that before you were lots of other moral...

Sia Henry (46:23)
Exactly.

Yeah, you can't unknow.

Mary Schaub (46:48)
justice warriors who went into the system for the right thing and also didn't make a difference taking that route. And you were looking at them going, okay, following in that same trodden path isn't going to get me what I want. So I'm gonna take my own path, which is so inspiring. As we close, I was thinking about how to bring this together. And I get kind of philosophical, as you can tell.

Sia Henry (46:56)
Hmm.

Mary Schaub (47:13)
But I I love the themes that we're talking about. They're all really, really important. But I do think that someone could be listening and just think, all right, well, I don't know anyone incarcerated. Maybe I'm lucky enough to not be anywhere near that world. I may have a certain feeling about psychedelics. So I don't know how this applies to me. But as I was thinking about it, I think that there's something that we can take away from the things that we've discussed that are sort of applicable to

Sia Henry (47:14)
I love it.

Mary Schaub (47:40)
all of our personal growth and development. So I was mulling on it before we started. And I thought, I think every single one of us has felt wronged. We've been hurt, we're angry. And I was reflecting on how it's so easy, certainly for me, to defend an attack when I feel someone has done me wrong. And I know after doing a lot of my own personal work that

my reaction is always about me, not the other person. And even when that hurt and anger is legitimate, there's an opportunity to respond differently. There's like a space before you respond and there's a possibility that you can respond with more grace and compassion. And if you can do that, and I'm not at all saying,

Sia Henry (48:12)
Hmm.

Mary Schaub (48:34)
I'm great at this and I do this all the time because it is a daily battle. But when I can respond that way, in my experience, it opens up this relational space between them and me. Like one where there's healing and growth for both of us. And it becomes a more human and humane interaction. Like you were just describing that person on the street who didn't like see you.

Sia Henry (48:52)
Mm.

Mary Schaub (49:03)
did not make eye contact, right? Every time we pass someone on the street or we talk to someone like you and I are talking now, it's like, there's an opportunity for us to really like be here with each other. Even if it's a look on the street and we've all seen it in New York, like, you know, I gave someone my seat on the subway the other day and there's just a moment where you're like, we're good and that's it, New Yorkers turned away and you don't do anything more. But it's such an important part of being human.

And I do credit shifts in my own consciousness for how I've been able to even know that this dynamic existed, even to be aware of like what I'm responding to is in me and not necessarily outside. And so of all the things that we talked about today, both criminal justice and the consciousness expanding medicines that you're involved with through maps is like, feel

like there's a lesson for us all that we could take away, even if these other topics and issues are like have nothing to do with anyone, which is like when you were describing, know, a perpetrator and a victim sitting down and healing and going through that process together, like we all do that in little micro instances all the time. And we have a choice to whether we like exile that person or exile our own experience from it, or if we go through that, go into that space with each other.

Sia Henry (50:14)
Exactly.

Mary Schaub (50:24)
and actually work through it and come out the other end and be a different person. And I don't know, that's what I was like so excited to talk to you about and the work that you're doing. I don't know if you have a thought about, you know, kind of the big themes of what we're talking about today.

Sia Henry (50:42)
Definitely. mean, just with what you just said, when I did restorative justice work and we would train community-based organizations, one of the activities in our training was, you know, we would be in circle and we had to go around. We had two different question rounds. One was, talk about a time you've been harmed. And then the other one was talk about a time you've caused harm. Really just getting, just driving home kind what you were saying, the fact that we have all caused harm and been harmed in our lives.

And even if that harm didn't rise to the level of a crime or we just didn't get caught for whatever harm, whatever, we've all caused harm. And then the follow-up rounds for each of those questions were, think about what you needed in that time, both when you were harmed and also when you caused harm, really kind of helping people remember that even when we're talking about a person who has caused harm, they have needs as well. That might be, for instance, to be forgiven, know that like, for you to know that this isn't who I am.

⁓ you know, et cetera. And also understanding that a lot of the needs of both the people who've been harmed and the people who've caused harm in those instances, there's a lot of overlap in those needs. And so in kind of thinking to, listening to what you were just saying, there's, I love a good quote, there's a quote that says, the person you needed when you were younger. And I think that you can kind of expand that further in like being the person that you needed when you.

were harmed being the person you needed when you were the person harmed. Really giving people grace and that doesn't mean just like excusing people's behavior or not seeking accountability from them, but really understand, but digging deeper, being curious, maybe that's the bigger theme is just being curious and asking why. If you see the symptoms of something, really getting curious about, know, how did we get here? Why is this person behaving this way? As opposed to jumping to that quick kind of knee jerk.

know, call for punishment, that knee jerk, like othering of people and not, you know, not believing everything you hear in the news.

Mary Schaub (52:41)
Well said. I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful in speaking with people like you and this season. I mean, there's so many people out there from their own profession or their own part of the world that are really trying to bring more light and awareness and consciousness raising to the world. And while things feel dark, I do believe that

We need to sometimes go through really difficult things to grow and to force us out of our comfort zone. And I don't know, I'm really struck by how many people are seeking greater purpose and meaning more though, throughout my life I've never seen, even on LinkedIn people are talking about these themes. I have to believe that whether it's through traditional therapy, consciousness expanding medicines like psychedelics,

And it's a stretch, but even even podcasting people now on their commute are talking and listening to these types of subjects And I have to believe and that it means that we're all Trying to get there wherever there is And that at some point this will result in us all reconnecting with our humanity and hopefully Gosh learning to live more peacefully with one another because as you said at the beginning

Sia Henry (53:43)
Yeah.

Mary Schaub (54:02)
We have the means, we have the technology, And now it's in us. Now we really have the opportunity. And Sia, you are the perfect role model for how someone can be both a skillful practitioner, also live with integrity and focus on helping and healing. And I also think that we...

need to start to raise people up like you as role models because it will inspire someone else in a different field or in the same field or everyone can see that you can take your own path. And you sound like a critical thinker since you were a very little girl. And I'm sure that you have made a difference on countless, countless lives and will continue to do so.

So you just, you're just such a wonderful human being and so generous with your time and talking with me today. So thank you so much.