Ep 7: The Problem with Punishment and Homicide
Homicide is a horrifying act of harm. It's an action with permanent consequences. Our stories of homicide almost always define justice as punishment instead of healing. But punishment doesn't bring back the dead. It doesn’t promote healing for families who lose loved ones. And often punishment creates cycles of violence instead of interrupting them.
Our host Kathleen lost her brother to homicide when he was 20 years old. For this episode, Kathleen sits down with three amazing humans. Stanley (Jamel) Bellamy, Roslyn Smith, and Rev. Dr. Sharon White-Harrigan have all done decades of work to interrupt harm in their communities. They have all also served time for homicide and spent years reckoning with the impact of their actions. Together they talk about the limits of punishment for preventing future harm and helping people heal.
We also speak with Erika Sasson, an attorney and respected restorative justice practitioner. Erica has facilitated "direct dialogs" between people who have committed homicides and the loved ones of their victims.
Useful Links
Here’s a 2024 piece of research and analysis showing that red states with a focus on harsh punishments have higher rates of death by homicide. Here’s a 2016 piece from the National Institute of Justice debunking deterrence and punishment as an effective way to prevent or reduce crime.
Here’s a story about long termers struggling with the effects and impact of their acts. Here’s a study about the benefits of restorative justice for stakeholders of homicide.
Roslyn mentions her writing workshop with V (the artist formerly known as Eve Ensler). There's a great documentary called What I Want My Words To Do To You, about that workshop and the extraordinary women in it – find the trailer here. In the summer of 2025, it's available on Amazon through the PBS documentary add-on.
You can learn more about Erika Sasson on her website or connect with Erika on LinkedIn. She wrote an article about using a restorative justice approach for homicide for Vox in 2023 (paywall).
Jamel mentions Challenge to Change, and all the guests describe programs inside that helped them on their journeys. Check out this research about folks inside creating programs, including Challenge to Change. You can also hear him talk about the Problem with Punishment and Parole on episode 5 of this season!
Kathleen did a series of surrogate dialogs with people connected but not responsible for her brother’s murder. What does that mean and what does it look like? Her project was documented by filmmaker Des Almoradie in The Worst Thing/To Germany with Love (2019).
Transcript:
Kathleen P (Host): This is the Problem with Punishment podcast. Spoiler alert: The problem with punishment is it doesn't work. But the bigger problem is that we turn to punishment in every aspect of our lives, from our families to our neighborhoods, our boroughs, our city. We keep expecting punishment to make things better, when, for the most part, it makes whatever problem we're addressing worse. Every time punishment fails, it hurts. Some people have taken the pain of that failure and turned it into purpose.
I'm your host, Kathleen Pequeño, and I'll be talking with a range of New Yorkers who have experienced firsthand the failure of punishment and who found or created something better to do instead. From gun violence to child abuse to drug addiction, New York can lead the way in actually solving some of our most pressing problems. But first, we have to talk about the problem with punishment.
Thanks for joining us for our episode, The Problem with Punishing Homicide. My journey to this episode has been really long and complicated. The podcast has been a long and complicated journey, but really getting to do this conversation for me was a journey I started back in 1999. So, for listeners who haven't heard me talk about this on a different episode, when I was a teenager, I was 15 years old, my brother was 20 years old, and he was murdered by a group of people far away from here. And his murder was actually also the facilitating event for the deaths of two other people. We were largely not part of the prosecution process for various reasons. And there is a way in which I got to kind of just observe the punishment system at work, but we were never really tapped to be a part of it the way that so often family members of murder victims are.
As a matter of fact, no one was convicted of the crime until well over a decade later. Someone was first arrested in 1996. One of the other people who was likely would have been implicated died in the same action that that person was arrested in. And that person, like my brother, died from a gunshot wound. I went into a prison for the first time in 1999, about three years after someone was first arrested. I went in part to kind of ask and answer for myself, “so if this is the place that people go when they have been convicted of a crime like this, do I actually feel the impact of it on me?” I had already been questioning like, what difference does it make to my family? To the chaos, the pain that we were left with after my brother's death. So I had my doubts and I went in. The more I was inside and visiting with people inside, the more I became frustrated that, in fact, this voracious system was saying that it was doing things in the name of my brother and my family, but in fact, it was just kind of its own beast. I went in to support the Chicano Culture Club and Los Hermanos, and the work that they were doing to try and make their lives better while they were incarcerated, to really try and help communities outside as best they could from the inside.
Kathleen P (Host): And I found myself really getting to know a number of people, mostly men who had committed homicides, and how they were grappling with it and what they were trying to do. Their sense that they had something to do. They had a debt to pay, and that it wasn't going to be paid for in time. They could just endure the time, but that the real debt was one that they had determined for themselves and they were determined to address on their own terms.
And I have met since then any number of people who have been convicted of homicides, who have taken on similar level of responsibility, and I really wish that more people could get to know these people. So here we are in the podcast. I have spent many years talking to family members of murder victims. I want to point out that many of the people I know who have been convicted of homicides have also lost loved ones to homicides or extreme violence. And so I just want to say I continue to learn more from this group of people.
Now this episode is about people talking about homicide and murder. I think if you're not used to these conversations as much as I am or they are, you know, might be hard. Pause as you need to check out the transcript instead, if that's your jam. If you do listen, or even if you're reading, I really am going to ask you for some patience and to practice some patience in this and really kind of listen through, because I think you will hear over the course of the episode how these folks talk about their convictions changes over the course of the episode. And that part of it is because we're in a setting where we are not focused on judging them again, on trying them again, on feeling like, well, ‘I'm better than you because I have never done this’ when I know from talking to each of them that I have never been in the circumstances they have been in.
Kathleen P (Host): So yeah, I'm going to ask for some grace and patience. I hope you make it all the way through. I hope you ask yourself. When you say, “lock them up and throw away the key,” what that is actually talking about. Because ultimately, homicide is an act of indifference to the suffering of others. In almost any homicide, there's a moment where if someone decides like, wait a second, do I care about this human being, like in the slightest? That we could have a different outcome and that every time someone does do that, we open up new possibilities. So I'm going to ask for grace and patience, and I invite you to listen to my conversation with three really amazing people, all of whom do deep work in the community and with incarcerated people around issues of violence and trauma. I feel like it's a privilege to get to know them and get to see their work and support their work. So this is my conversation with Jamel Bellamy, Roslyn Smith, and Reverend Doctor Sharon White-Harrigan.
Stanley (Jamel) Bellamy: My name is Stanley Bellamy. I'm formerly incarcerated. I served 37.5 years. Of the 62, 62.5 years of a life sentence. And what brings me to this conversation is that I went to prison because of a homicide.
Rev. Dr. Sharon White-Harrigan: My name is the Reverend Doctor Sharon White-Harrigan. I served 11 years collectively in the New York State, a maximum prison for women. And I, too, served time on a homicide.
Roslyn Smith: My name is Roslyn Smith. I served 39.5 years in the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for women. I'm here because of a homicide.
Kathleen P (Host): I'm Kathleen Pequeño. I'm the host, and I - I really wanted to have this conversation. And I have to say, it is just such an honor for each of you to take time out. I know each of you does so much in your in your personal lives for your families and communities. I think it's helpful to ask, you know, if there's anything about language that you think is important for people to know, or like words to use, or words not to use. As we talk about this.
Stanley (Jamel) Bellamy: There's a number of words that I would not use when we speak about not just homicides, but the people. And one of the words is “criminal” or “inmates.” Because if we want to humanize this whole situation and we want to make a real change in what's going on, we have to we can identify people as human beings and people and not labels.
Kathleen P (Host): Ros, assuming that some of our listeners don't know why we say “criminal legal system” instead of “criminal justice system,” will you say a couple words about that?
Roslyn Smith: As far as I'm concerned, it's not a justice system because it really doesn't mete out justice. It's a legal system that more or less caters to, that doesn't cater to the Black and Brown community, that doesn't cater to marginalized people, that caters to the wealthy, that caters to white people. And that is proven. And, you know, the disparities in sentences between Black and Brown individuals and poor people, people that are poor, it more or less criminalizes poverty. If you don't have money, they look at you, the system looks at you as less than. And it's just not a just system.
Stanley (Jamel) Bellamy: Most individuals that you think are at present, and that's why we call the criminal legal system. There's a vast majority of people in prison that's in prison for what they would call felony murder. They have the label of being a murderer, but they ain't felony murder. They're not the actual person who committed the homicide, but they have that label on themselves. And so that means that me all four of us go to a place and you decide that you want to shoot somebody. All four of us will be charged with homicide, and all four of us can be convicted of homicide. And all four of us can get a life sentence based on the act of one person. So let's be clear, when we talk about homicide, murder, and, you know, and that's just one form of homicide. Now you have what we have, Robert Brooks situation, the young man that was killed in Marcyy Prison. There's some of the officers that are being charged with manslaughter, even though that's a murder. It's called manslaughter, and it carries a less less weight than the actual murder. So there's different degrees of homicides inside of New York State.
Rev. Dr. Sharon White-Harrigan: When people think of justice, you think of fairness. When you hear it, you think that, okay, this is something that should happen. But how do we explain how poorly this system is ran? How do we explain how poorly from the moment of arrest, to you know someone being detained, to someone being incarcerated, even to release? So there's nothing just or justified about it. Punishing people for homicides, and when we look at it from a critical, social, or restorative justice perspective, focuses on how these measures often fail to address the root causes of violence. And it's like, you know, in a lot of the work that we do, it seems like we're always saying over and over. “You're not addressing the root causes of this violence and how violence can perpetuate cycles of harm,” that if you don't address them, that you're perpetuating cycles of harm rather than creating safety or healing, you know? So it's proven proving harsh punishment doesn't end, and giving people long prison sentences or even the death penalty, they don't reinforce healing. It reinforces a culture of violence.
We as folks that have this personal experience definitely don't diminish the harm. When we look at things like this, when people are hurt and—you know, that cliche hurt people, hurt people, but healed people can heal people. When we talk about just restoration and healing, how we should put forgiveness at the table first? Right. Not just, you know, in eye for an eye. You know, you hear people, oh, I want justice. I want them, you know. But the fact is, there is no justice because when you lose someone and another family loses that someone to their actions, nobody wins. We have an opportunity to restore, you know, what has been taken. And so I think it's really how people come to the table as hard as clergy. It's hard to forgive.
Roslyn Smith: I take responsibility for the role that I played in my crime. But I came from an environment where my mother was a drug addict, where I was running the streets at 13 years old, running away, doing drugs, experimenting with drugs. I was sexually assaulted as a young girl when I ran away. And all of these things, the poverty, the trauma, all of these things had an effect on how I saw the world. And I didn't start seeing the world differently until I got arrested and started college. And that is what changed my perspective, because the message that I was getting from society was like, I didn't matter. Nobody cared, you know? And these are things that people in marginalized communities and, that and poverty, and mental health struggles, and domestic violence, and lack of opportunities; these are the things that contribute to the violence.
Stanley (Jamel) Bellamy: Each one of us responds totally different. And that's that needs to be clear that, you know, we're not making excuses for the environment, but the environment also played a role in how we develop our thinking. Like there's a saying that information determines your philosophy, your philosophy determines your attitude, and your attitude determines your behavior. And based on how we’re educated, how we’re informed and the message that gets through, through all that other stuff that penetrates our brain—that's the message that develops our outlook on the world and how we know we view the world. And from that view, it tells us how we're going to look at and treat people. And if we have a negative view of ourselves in that world, we're going to treat people negatively. So when you don't value your own self or you don't value your own life, it's no way you can value anybody else’s.
Roslyn Smith: My victim's daughter wrote me a letter and conveyed to me through the DA that I tore her family apart. My actions tore her family apart. But me being in prison for the rest of my life was not going to change that. And she had asked the DA for me to write a letter explaining, because she, I guess she understood what was happening in my life. She wanted to know, like, what was your life? What have what was your life before prison? What have you done in prison? And what will you do come home? She wanted to know the steps that I was going to take and how I would change my behavior. And I wrote her, I wrote her like a four-page letter and sent it to her. And she came back and she wrote a letter. When I went to the parole board, she wrote a letter saying that she did not want me to stay in prison for the rest of my life, that she thought that I could do great things once I came home, even though I had did something to cause her so much harm. And it wasn't about forgiveness; it was about understanding the process of a human being.
Kathleen P (Host): My brother was actually killed by middle-class, armed revolutionaries, people with great politics—you know, supposedly. I used to go to a family-member-of-murder-victims support group, and most of the folks there are actually domestic violence homicides. People act as if the difference between punishing and not punishing people is that it's going to bring back the dead, which it doesn't. None of these strategies brings back the dead. But I want to come back to, I think, a theme that I've heard each of you talk about in the past, and you're talking a little bit now, which is also that people change. They're not the same people anymore, and they're more interested in doing good than many other people. Actually, people act like punishment brings back the dead, and it doesn't. They also act like punishment is the thing that's going to prevent more violence. And we've been talking about that—it's not.
Stanley (Jamel) Bellamy: Since I spent 37 years in prison Kathleen, the most important things I've came to learn is that when you give people the proper information, when you give people to value themselves. I have a bunch of sayings, and another saying is, "that history plus culture gives you your values. Your values, plus your lifestyle, gives you your behavior." And so when you begin, people to give you no understanding of their culture, their history, and they can't get them to stop feeling bad about themselves and making them believe that they can actually do something to make that change. A lot of us, while we was incarcerated, a lot of individuals of the programs that I created while I was in there, these men came home and they came home with the commitment to come home. To try to assist with the development and helping redeem themselves through their actions and trying to, we say ‘we assist with the development of dysfunctional neighborhoods into productive and vibrant communities.’ And how do we do that? By coming out. Going out into the street, talking to you, telling the true story about incarceration. Some of us that get involved in this lifestyle, that going to prison is a right of passage. We dispel that myth. You get rid of that myth, and it's important that we get rid of that myth out here, because there's really no “prison problem.” We say that doesn't have its origin in the community because I wasn't born in prison. So my attitudes, my belief system, and everything was created in the community that I was in. And if I can change the leader's mind, he will change the minds of all the rest. And we can do that in the community before they get to prison. We don't have to wait till they get to prison. We don't have to wait until they commit a crime or homicide or whatever. We do that right here in the community. If we was given the proper resources and the opportunity to do it instead of just, you know, ‘lock them up and throw away the key,’ because that doesn't solve anything. It doesn't solve anything.
Roslyn Smith: When I was incarcerated, I was in a writing group with Eve Ensler. And writing, for me, was a way to express myself, a way to get my hurts out. I started writing when I was very young. And it's the way it was, a way for me to heal. And what I do now is I go into transitional housing, and I teach women writing. We have writing groups, and we heal through writing. I talk to the law students, I tell them how, you know, if you become a lawyer, you become a DA, how you are impacting somebody's life and not only their lives, the community that they come from, their kids and and everything. Because sometimes people don't realize how mass incarceration just devastates a whole community. Living with knowing that I was a part of a homicide has been very difficult for me. And I carry this with me not every day, but it comes up, and people don't realize that. They think, because I'm home and I'm out here and I'm doing the work, that I don't think about it. I constantly think about it, and it's a weight on me, and that's why I'm in therapy.
Rev. Dr. Sharon White-Harrigan: What I do today has a lot to do with my time in prison. You know, I think for me, I'm not going to say it doesn't matter how you get there. But I think that, you know, for us as people and, you know, it's been mentioned, you know, looking at self-worth, looking at your, you know, your self-esteem, understanding where you've been in life. When I went to prison, I didn't realize how many people, how many women had trauma, you know, had a baseline of just harm and hurt in their life, you know? And there wasn't any social workers. There wasn't people to tap into. And I think you, Ros, had, you know, said it as far as being able to deal with while you were there. Right. All of the things that has happened in your life, having some understanding of it yourself right before you can even convey it or to anybody else. And so coming out, for me it was important for me to become a social worker. It was important because that wasn't accessible to us. How do you have people who call this ‘Department of Corrections?’ Nothing correctional about it. So now in my work, it is about understanding. It is about forgiveness. It is about how do we put a narrative of our own. Not what the newspaper, not what the media, not what social media, not what the news, you know, they always paint us—and when I say us, people of color—as animals, as monsters, as deviants. We shouldn't, you know, be ever put back into society.
I think that we work very hard. More so because of where we've been. Because of why we were there. And so I'm big on the community. I'm big on people. I'm big on prevention. I'm big on intervention. On the fact that if we don't get a hold of the youngins. If we don't get a hold of our fellow people in the community. What will it look like even a year from now? What happened in our life? What happened in that instant, in that moment, still carries with us. That we do care, and that we don't want to be defined by that worst moment in that worst day in that worst time. Because that's not who we are.
And so everything that I do, from teaching, from my ministry to my clinical work, to my running an organization, every single thing I breathe is about healing.
Roslyn Smith: A lot of people don't realize that. You know, we do think about stuff like that. We do, you know, we take into account the harm we have caused and transform it into something powerful and something healing.
Stanley (Jamel) Bellamy: What people really don't understand about a lot of us that did time that came out here and doing this work, it's that we carry that guilt because we understand we took the time to process the harm, pain, and suffering that we cause. And I don't like using this term “victim” family, but we made them victims. That's the only way you can describe it. And our own family and ourselves. We took the time to really do a lot of introspection while we was on the inside. And people don't understand it, that we did the introspection and we carry that guilt, and we try to make amends the best way we can. And like Sharon said, we do not want to be defined by the worst decision of our life. And we understood. And this is the thing that we say when we look at other things. We took accountability and responsibility for our actions. And because we took accountability and responsibility and we understood the harm, pain and suffering that we caused others, when we came home, we decided that we was going to get in this type of thing to try to do something about that pain, that harm, that suffering. You know, to make sure other people don't have to experience that same pain. Eddie Ellis, he recruited me into an organization, a group he set up. And through that organization, he finally I finally began to get the type of training that I never received while I was home, and an understanding my connection to the community.
Stanley (Jamel) Bellamy: But it wasn't until I've read and I don't know if I should say his name over the air. The young man that was killed in my case. It wasn't until I read my pre-sentence report and read his mother's statement that I really understood the harm and pain and suffering that I caused her, because I never seen that statement until 1991. And after I read that statement, I could never go back to being that knucklehead person that I was. And reading that statement at 1991, I made the decision that I would do everything in my power to make sure no more, no more mothers had to cry because their young son was murdered at the prime of their life, because he was 19 years old. And that I would do everything I could in my power to make sure no more mothers had to cry because their young sons were sent to prison with sentences exceeding their life expectancy. The Department of Correctional Services doesn't do this for us. We do it for ourselves. We understand. We do that introspection. We understand it. We need to address some of that trauma because they have no programs set up to address the outcome. Punishment is not the answer that we need to address. We want to deal with prevention, not reacting to something. Let's start dealing with prevention. Let's put our focus in prevention. Before something happens, let's catch it immediately there and work on it because it's no prison problem. It starts in the community.
Roslyn Smith: I really feel like to break the cycle of violence, and I feel like society must really adopt a more compassionate approach by fostering communities of healing. Like and this begins with asking individuals in crisis, and especially children, two fundamental questions: “How can I help?” And “what do you need to succeed?” And I think these questions will create a lot of space for empathy, validation, and connections, like schools, social services, and community organizations can play vital roles in providing mentorship. Things that we do and by centering the needs and voices of those in crisis, I think we can create environments healing rather than punishment, because punishment becomes the foundation for everything in society. And so we have to change.
Rev. Dr. Sharon White-Harrigan: The one thing I would love people to know about punishment and homicide is that there is justice beyond punishment, and how we approach that matters the most. It's not this way, right? It really isn't. People can't say enough. “Sorry.” Sorry doesn't compensate, doesn't bring back, doesn't do anything, but probably piss you off, right? Even more. But what I can say is that the more we pour into one another, the more that we pour into the community, the less we would have of this. Harm plus harm equals more harm.
Stanley (Jamel) Bellamy: The individual is this person. If we just correct this person right here, it'll solve everything. And that's what punishment is saying, we just correct this person and solve everything. And it's not just the individual. We have to look at the structural. Forget the punishment, but let's get to it before we get to there ever being a homicide.
Kathleen P (Host): When we're really solving these problems well, we're so far upstream that the problem is not even in sight. That really should be the goal. It's worth doing things to prevent homicide. And the question is then, well, what are the things that we do and do they work, you know, and what is the cost of them? And I don't mean money, I mean in the human cost. And that's where I think that's where punishment comes up short compared to the things that the three of you do. And you know, I heal from my brother's murder a little bit more every time I talk with people who have made the journeys that you three have made.
Kathleen P (Host): I don't know your burden specifically, but I do know that each of you proceeds with kind of the burden of having been connected to to the loss of someone's life. And I just want to say, I know that you fight really hard for yourselves in the face of that, and I appreciate it. And I think it's part of what makes each of you so extraordinary. It's really a privilege to get to talk to you about it, because I mean, I also wake up every day being like, Am I doing enough to prevent homicide? And I'm not sure that I do, in part because I measure myself against each of you.
Kathleen P (Host): Well, thank you to Jamil, Sharon, and Roz for that conversation. And thank you, listener, for making it this far in the episode. I know conversations about homicide are heavy. This is not a true crime. There is no deep satisfaction here. There is just the reality of the true story of homicide, which is lives ripped apart, and really either healing or despair. So often those are the choices like healing or trauma, disruption, despair, and more trauma.
I try as much as possible to always be calling for things that allow people to heal. And there's lots of different ways that can look right. There's lots of different things that should be available to people. There are not a lot of choices, though, for family members or murder victims for anything other than participating in systems of punishment. I personally pretty much decided that I would design my own healing journey. I mean, ultimately, that's what everyone does. Mine involves traveling to where my brother's death occurred in Germany, and I had wanted to do what's called ‘direct dialogue,’ which was sitting down with the people who had been convicted of the crime, possibly who were there when my brother's life ended in pain and terror. Turns out that was not an option. So I turned to something called surrogate dialogue. Perhaps I will do a different episode about that. If you want to learn more about my journey with Surrogate Dialogue. There's a documentary film called The Worst Thing that my friend Desireena Almoradie made. But a small number of people in New York actually could choose direct dialogue. It's not widely available, and I really wish that it was. So it's not that widely available, but I was very fortunate to ask Erika Sasson, who is a restorative justice practitioner based here in New York City, and she agreed to meet with me also over the internet. Although our initial conversation was in person to kind of talk about it, and we had a conversation about both the potential and the limits of direct dialogue and why a person might choose that, and how it fits into the really big puzzle of what is available to people after homicide.
Erika Sasson: My name is Erika Sasson. I'm an attorney, and I'm also a practitioner of restorative justice processes. And I work especially in areas of complex harm. I work with victims of sexual violence, domestic violence, and I work in areas including homicide.
Kathleen P (Host): How did you wind up working with people around serious violence and or homicide?
Erika Sasson: I did my first homicide process when I was still at the Center for Justice Innovation, and it came to me very haphazardly. Somebody there was somebody whose father had been killed, and she wanted a process, and I did the process. I basically created a process for her because she really needed to speak to the person who had killed her father. After that process, and the whole experience of it, a couple of months later, I think I had I had left my job at the Center for Justice Innovation, and I went out on my own, and I wanted to pursue the kinds of processes that you can't do if you're in an organization or you're running programming or you're fundraising or you're kind of doing all of that other work. I wanted to specialize in areas that the restorative justice movement wasn't doing. So people in organizations were doing assaults, and they were dealing with conflict in the workplace or conflict in community, but we weren't pursuing some of the more difficult areas. And I kind of said, okay, this is an area for me to dig into.
I think in, in the legal system what would happen is let's say with an incident like a homicide incident is an arrest is made. So one of the kind of most important things that happens in New York is, the clock stops. So the right to speedy trial and all other areas, there's a really kind of intense focus on moving this through the courts as fast as possible, but with a homicide that doesn't actually happen.
And so those cases take a much longer time. So sometimes it can be three and a half years before, you know, something has been finalized by the courts. And that's actually agonizingly long for a family of somebody who has been killed, because—this is just what I've observed, and I'm just going to share something anecdotally—is until that case is closed, it's almost like the grieving process can't start. Everybody is holding their breath as the families of victims. And these families are really different. This is like the most important thing to say; everyone comes at this in a really different way. There is just no homogenous version of losing a loved one to an act of violence, which is like a really horrific experience. But if this was to be the case for a lot of families, you're waiting for the legal system to finish in order to kind of return to your private life and deal with the aftermath of it, deal with your grief, begin the process of kind of sorting yourself out as to how you're going to integrate this news into your own life. While this is happening, it's basically like the legal system is going in fits and starts. There are all kinds of hearings or all kinds of moments. For a lot of families, they don't exactly understand. There is no explanation of what happened in a meaningful way. There is certainly no sense of the person taking responsibility. You don't hear from the person why they did it, what happened that day, what the victim's reaction was, what their last words might have been.
I just want to describe this a long, drawn out process of, on the one hand, denying and deflecting responsibility and outright, you know, completely minimizing what you did in order to prevent the worst kind of punishment from happening. And on the other end, a lack of understanding of what happened, a lack of knowing what happened in those very last moments. That's often very important for people whose family members have passed is like, I just want to know that day. I just need to so, you know, you're not getting at some of the really core things. And for the person who caused the harm, I'm going to flip back and forth, because I'm always carrying both in these processes. For the person who caused the harm, you're also not getting at the why and what happened that day, what was going on for the person, what was the environment. And when we skip asking those why questions, we also lose any opportunity to prevent future harm, because we're just not doing the introspection that we need to do to make meaningful shifts, right in either behavior and environment. And other people's responsibility for whatever happened that day.
Kathleen P (Host): So many ways people can harm each other, you know, to the point of homicide. But what the large the vast majority of people agree about is it's worth some effort to try to prevent it.
Erika Sasson: I think it's important to focus on how much it drags out, how much, unless you're important to the legal system or to its proving of it, it's possible that you will be sidelined entirely. So we're dealing with somebody trying to defend themselves from this kind of over-disproportionately kind of aggressive punishment system, and making decisions about their relationship to the punishment system and not their relationship to the harm that they caused. Not to the people to whom they owe a responsibility, which includes their own family, their own community. Instead, they're really caught up with making decisions, these would be the legal system.
There's so many interesting questions that one would want to kind of pose, if one was really interested in not replicating this kind of harm over and over again. And those questions are just really not relevant to what's happening in the legal system. And so if you flipped to what you would do and what I call ‘a process,’ it would really be about beginning—and it takes a lot of time and a lot of trust to work with both sides of this horrific harm. And so it's a really complex process. It doesn't resolve everybody's needs. I wouldn't say that. It's certainly not a fix.
Kathleen P (Host): No one can tell you how to heal, but the possibility of you healing is a priority.
Erika Sasson: It's hard to tell people you have a responsibility to heal, right? But the truth is that when we don't make it a part of public safety and a part of like our social investment, like as a community, we don't make these opportunities like, so visible for people to be able to take them if they want them. But I do think there is a return to the present moment that can happen when you kind of touch a healing process. And I've had survivors say, like “I've been able to be with my kids in a real way, in a way that I was just I was gone, I was like, not present and accounted for.” And that's just like something that we're really missing when we're not making healing opportunities available.
The conviction does not release the grief, of all of these kinds of terrible feelings. The problem is we've equated taking seriously with absurd and disgusting, and inhumane punishment. And so those two things don't have to be the same.
Kathleen P (Host): Right, right. But non-action is not also tenable. Right? The choice isn't between punishment and inaction. That it's never that. That's not what we're about. And I think that's at times what people are thinking. And that's actually what the punishment system says, right? If the if the only reason to not punish people—usually presented by the system—is if the people who are harmed have no value. That's not what I'm about. I'm like the choices between punishment and something that actually creates the changes that we want.
Erika Sasson: I think sometimes we think about restorative justice, and we think about this kind of like touchy-feely, just say, I'm sorry and everyone will get over it. And people have really reductive views of this. I think we need like, you know, if my loved one causes a really serious harm because of behavior that they are not addressing, then I want some serious loving consequences. Really, like I think about tough love. That's like. And that's coming from a sense of like, you belong to me and I belong to you. And you can't operate this way. That's really important to say.
Kathleen P (Host): When we mess up, we all want mercy and understanding.
Erika Sasson: It doesn't have to be easy, but we need a path to return to those to whom we belong. We need more dialogue. Do you know what I mean?
Kathleen P (Host): Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Erika Sasson: Understand our experience. And who have, like, touched the same kind of backdrop that we've touched. To begin our healing, we need to say things out loud. We need to grieve out loud. We need to be witnessed. So if you're doing that with somebody who shares an experience with you, but from a different perspective, that's brilliant. Like, why wouldn't like to me, I guess. I guess that question of like, it's either it's restorative justice is like direct dialogue, or you should go to the criminal punishment system. Like, that can't be the binary that we live in. Like, we need an ecosystem of healing opportunities. If I could say one thing, I would say this woman who did my first ever process that launched this whole part of my work. She said, "Every person who loses a person, as I did, should have the opportunity to speak to the person who hurt them. I can't tell you how well I've slept starting that night. This process helped me to let my dad rest in peace." She also said to me in a later time, you know, that her kids, like I said, or you know that she said that her kids felt her return to them. And so it is to me about getting into the present and being able to face the future and not being kind of held hostage, quite frankly, by what's happened. And in the capacity to, to look ahead and to have your, your future open up for you in a way, when when you're cycling through a past act, it really keeps its hold on you.
This is the thing. You can't promise anything to anyone. But sometimes, and this is why it's worth trying. Because if it works and you can start to look towards the future again, like what a blessing that is. The one thing that I would say to people is like, it's like really, really important for me to be non-judgmental about how people react in these moments. And so we just need a lot of love to be able to transform something. We need a lot of support and a lot of love and a little bit less judgment.
Kathleen P (Host): The month this episode comes out, August of 2025, is 40 years since my brother's homicide in August of 1985, and in that 40 years, I have talked to and listened to way more than 40 family members and murder victims. And some of those folks, by the way, have committed homicides. The two groups are not mutually exclusive. The reality of dealing with homicide has been kind of paved over by cop shows and the true crime genre. And what I really want to bring us back to is each homicide is a loss. You don't need to decide if a homicide is horrible based on the character of the victim, or what they were doing, or the circumstances of the murder. Each one is lost potential. Each one is a loss to a family. And punishment isn't getting us a world without homicide. There is justice, I think, beyond punishment. But for me, I'm less concerned about justice and more focused on healing. I think, as you've seen in any number of episodes of this podcast, healing and love and patience, an incredible amount of patience, are really the things that are going to help us solve our biggest problems, including the problem of homicide. And just remember, the choice isn't between punishment and doing nothing. The choice is between punishment and doing things that work.
Kathleen P (Host): This podcast was produced in Brooklyn, New York, the unceded ancestral lands of the Lenape and Canarsie people. We thank all the ancestors for caring for this land over the generations, and we're committed to the work of creating a shared future that includes the native communities that are still here, and all the people who call this land home. I want to thank Jamel Bellamy, Roslyn Smith, and Reverend Doctor Sharon White-Harrigan for sitting with me and sharing themselves with me, and also thank them for the work they do in the community to prevent and repair violence every day. Thank you also to Erika Sasson for sitting down with me to talk about her experience. The podcast team for this episode is Doctor Candace King and Reverend Doctor Sharon White-Harrigan, who, as I mentioned, also joined us on mic for this episode. And Tess Weiner. Thank you to our production partner, JuleCave Studios, and our creative partner, Julius Shepard-Morgan. I'm your host, Kathleen Pequeño. This podcast is a project of the Justice Beyond Punishment Collaborative at the Center for Justice at Columbia University, with support from Trinity Wall Street. You can learn more about the collaborative and our other creative projects at BeyondPunishment.org. Thanks so much for listening.
