Where Health, Policy, and Justice Collide

“I realized the world was so much more complex,” Silveira recalls. “There were all these areas of study I had never even known existed.”

Encouraged by faculty and peers who stretched her viewpoints, Silveira gravitated toward psychology and political science. She was drawn to the messy, intersecting systems that shape people’s lives — where health, policy, and justice collide.

During a semester abroad at Trinity College Dublin, Silveira closely examined the European carceral system, puzzled by how different societies choose to punish, rehabilitate, or restore. She was struck by how different other nations’ concepts of justice were from the system she knew back home.

Returning to campus, Silveira enrolled in the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, sharing a classroom with incarcerated students in Chester, Pa. Inside the seminar circle, she found the heart of her future work.

“We were all just people, each of us doing our best,” she says. “And hearing their stories made it impossible not to see the harms of the criminal legal system up close.”

After graduation, Silveira entered the whirlwind of community-based work as a mental health case manager in Washington, D.C., during the pandemic. Her clients faced overlapping crises: severe mental illness, substance use disorders, housing instability, unmet medical needs. It was her first direct view of how tangled the country’s social safety net is. She realized that meaningful change required fluency in both human stories and the policies that shape them.

That drove her to pursue a dual JD/MSW at Boston College, and then an internship in the Public Defender Division of the Committee for Public Counsel Services. There, she learned the practice of holistic defense, writing mitigation reports that helped judges see clients not as case files but as people. Her work helped reduce one client’s sentence, allowing them to remain in a substance-use treatment program where they were finally finding stability.

As a 2025 Rappaport Center for Law and Public Policy Fellow, Silveira stepped into state policymaking, working at the Executive Office of Health and Human Services at a moment when Massachusetts was considering major reentry and Medicaid reforms. She watched how ideas become policy, how policy becomes practice, and how human impact is measured in real time.

Silveira’s path — spanning classrooms, prisons, courtrooms, and state offices — embodies the liberal arts traditions of exploring curiosity across disciplines. She isn’t sure what comes next, but can see the shape of the work she wants to do. It is the work of bridging worlds — individual and systemic, legal and social, personal and structural. “The kind of work that helps people,” she says, “and hopefully helps change the systems around them, too.”