Fleet Maull, PhD. is an author, meditation teacher, mindset coach, social entrepreneur and peacemaker who works at the intersection of personal and social transformation. He founded Prison Mindfulness Institute and National Prison Hospice Association, catalyzing two national movements, while serving a 14-year mandatory-minimum federal drug sentence, 1985 to 1999. He also founded the transformational education platform Heart Mind Institute and co-founded the Engaged Mindfulness Institute where he trains trauma-informed mindfulness teachers who work with individuals and communities impacted by trauma and marginalization. He has served on the leadership team for the annual Auschwitz-Birkenau Bearing Witness Retreat for more than 20 years. He co-founded the Rwanda Bearing Witness Retreat and has trained genocide survivors as volunteer trauma para-counselors working in villages throughout Rwanda.

He is a Roshi (Zen master/senior teacher) in the Zen Peacemaker Community, a senior Dharma teacher in the Shambhala-Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and leads meditation retreats worldwide. He developed Neuro-Somatic Mindfulness or NSM, a deeply embodied, neuroscience and trauma informed approach to mindfulness & awareness meditation practice that facilitates self-healing, self-regulation, and awakening. He founded both the Global Resilience Summit and the Global First Responder Resilience Summit and co-founded The Best Year of Your Life, SummitPalooza, Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy Global Summit, and The Self-Care Summit.

Dr. Maull is the author of Radical Responsibility: How to Move Beyond Blame, Live Your Highest Purpose and Become an Unstoppable Force for Good; Dharma in Hell: The Prison Writings of Fleet Maull, and the Resilient C.O.: Mindfulness-Based Wellness & Resiliency for Corrections Professionals.

When Sylvia attended law school, the students were told that they were learning the best legal system possible. A decade into her legal career, she realized there are two models of justice: vengeance and Love, and in law school she learned the vengeance model—retributive justice. She did not know what Justice as Love was or how to implement it but at that moment she vowed to figure it out. For the past 37 years, Sylvia has studied how to implement Justice as Love and created a theory for what she now calls Unitive Justice, a model of justice that has no punitive elements. In 2003 she left her law practice to focus on developing Unitive Justice theory and implementation.

Sylvia’s new book, Unitive Justice: Bending the Arc of Justice Toward Love, makes the case for Unitive Justice as a viable alternative to punitive justice wherever people come together—in schools, organizations, businesses, jails and prisons, communities and even within nations. She has taught Unitive Justice in many workshops, at the university level, in k-12 schools and in a prison.  

Based on what she learned from two men who were each incarcerated for over 20 years but who changed the culture of the prison using principles that align with Unitive Justice theory, Sylvia created Unitive Justice Criminology theory. It guides us in implementing Unitive Justice principles and practices within our correctional institutions to achieve system change from within. The deep divide between the citizens at large who feel threatened by crime and those convicted of crime is addressed by using our investment in incarceration as an inmate “reset” opportunity, a path to their transformation if they so choose. How can inmate transformation be achieved? UJ Criminology addresses both the individual brokenness that manifests in acts of crime and the systemic brokenness that fuels crime and perpetuates unsafe communities and that often goes unrecognized. This theory charts a path for those who were the problem to become the solution. 

Sylvia is President and Executive Director of the Alliance for Unitive Justice (AUJ), a nonprofit headquartered in Richmond, Va. (a4uj.org)  Sylvia is writing lesson plans for courses to be taught through the Unitive Justice Academy, an online training platform where AUJ will offer all of its courses on Unitive Justice theory, practice and implementation. In September, 2024 the staff of two schools in Uganda are the first to begin training in the UJEd Whole School Program through the Unitive Justice Academy.

Sylvia holds graduate degrees from the University of California at Berkeley (MPA), Boston University School of Law (JD) and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government (MPA). A former Peace Corps Volunteer in Nepal, she was co-founder and Chair of the Board of Women’s Bank in Richmond, Va., and has been active in community service throughout her career. Her websites are sylviaclute.com and unitivejustice.com.