Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Harm reduction has created an opportunity for social workers to stay radical in their practice of social work. So many radical people get into social work because they’re already doing the work of being a resource or a support in their community and the letters from the social work degree makes the work sustainable. So, how do we have the conversations about holding to our radical politic when social work makes us complicit with the state so often? I don’t actually think TJ can be practiced in social work, because so much social work is inherently complicit with the state. And that is the difference between TJ and restorative justice, that TJ is inherently outside the state. I think we can use the values of TJ to guide our practice. And, we can turn to RJ [restorative justice] practices, which can be really useful for social workers, who are already complicit with the state. So there’s no risk of co-opting the TJ movement—because we can reach for RJ. A lot of what we talk about is when to reach for RJ because it reduces harm in that system. And then how do we hold our larger values so that we are not in conflict with the radical practice that brought us to social work, but instead like trying to figure out how to stay sustainable in the work, while holding the value of not being complicit with the state.