Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

So many people experiencing violence or other emergencies don’t want to call the police—or in some cases understand that they should not—but have no idea of what to do instead. In the years leading up to our decision to coedit this book, both of us witnessed many conversations where people would complain that there were “no resources” to explain how transformative justice or community accountability works. Both of us knew that there were resources, but you need to know where to look to find them. Accessing so many of the resources that we knew about required knowing who to ask, what workshops to take, where and when they were happening, and what terms to Google—and if you were outside a particular generation or movement context, knowing all that didn’t come easy. Organizations don’t always stay around and are often under-resourced, so if you don’t know where to look, you may find only the remnants. At the same time, there’s been an upswing in the past five years of writing about transformative justice that sings its praises and talks about what a wonderful thing it is but is short on the specifics of how exactly you do it. This project began because we wanted to offer a resource that could help explain not why but how to do transformative justice.