Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Be here. Be all over the place. Be messy. Be wrong. Be bold in your hopefulness. Be confused in community. Be reaching past isolation. Be part of the problem. Be hungry for after. Be helpful in the midst. Be so early in the process. Be broken by belief. Be bolstered by brave comrades. Be unbelievably unready. Be alive.

Many people have told us that when they think of transformative justice, they think it is “a really long process where people talk about what happened, cry, get overwhelmed, and eventually stop answering their emails.”

While I don’t believe that we can separate ourselves from our privileges, we can leverage them toward justice.

One of our largest failures in this arena seems to stem from arrogance. There are times we believe we have the skills to address harm simply because we have a strong political analysis or a strong desire to address harm. There’s a substantial distinction between having skills and learning skills, between being experts and practicing.

I think at least one part of the answer is for us to significantly widen our view of what transformative processes can look like. A community accountability process involving all parties together in a room can’t be the gold standard for every situation.

But I also wonder: Is this what we’re here for? To cultivate a fear-based adherence to reductive common values? What can this lead to in an imperfect world full of sloppy, complex humans? Is it possible we will call each other out until there’s no one left beside us? I’ve had tons of conversations with people who, in these moments of public flaying, avoid stepping up on the side of complexity or curiosity because in the back of our minds is the shared unspoken question: When will y’all come for me? The places I’m drawn to in movement espouse a desire for transformative justice—justice practices that go all the way to the root of the problem and generate solutions and healing there, such that the conditions that create injustice are transformed. And yet … we don’t really know how to do it. We call it transformative justice when we’re throwing knives and insults, exposing each other’s worst mistakes, reducing each other to moments of failure. We call it holding each other accountable. I’m tired of it. I see it everywhere I turn. When the response to mistakes, failures, and misunderstandings is emotional, psychological, economic, and physical punishment, we breed a culture of fear, secrecy, and isolation. So, I’m wondering, in a real way: How can we pivot toward practicing transformative justice? How do we shift from individual, interpersonal, and interorganizational anger toward viable generative sustainable systemic change?

Real time is slower than social media time, where everything feels urgent. Real time often includes periods of silence, reflection, growth, space, self-forgiveness, processing with loved ones, rest, and responsibility.

So, right now in Philadelphia, we’re experiencing this incredible moment where people who have been in prison for twenty, thirty, forty years, since they were teenagers, are quickly getting resentenced, and coming home, like, weeks or months later. And that’s amazing, and creating so many moments of also working with a lot of groups that identify as victim support groups, in communities where people who were harmed by the acts of violence that people went to prison for are still in community, or attend the same place of worship with each other’s families.

What was hard: Sometimes at the end of an accountability process, people don’t feel much better. That is painful, confusing, and sometimes heartbreaking to see and witness. Accountability processes don’t delete the harm and violence that has been done and the echoes of past acts of violence and repression that ring throughout the bodies of survivors and communities. How can accountability processes effectively make behavioral and institutional change while still centering healing?

Jenna Peters-Golden

So then you have this tension of like, I don’t believe in activating the state, but I’m witnessing horrific violence, and I need to take an action that doesn’t lead to violence against me as the worker, and that doesn’t increase the violence against the people who are being harmed, and so now I’m in this conflict because I don’t believe in being complicit with the state, and this is the only solution that I have going, and I need to sit with how I resolve this effectively, but the truth is that there is no effective resolution for that tension.

And just because the healing process is hard doesn’t mean that all the violence is the same, and that we need to address that violence differently. There is not a hierarchy in violence, it’s just very important that everyone knows that each thing is not the same. I hear a lot of lumping all sexual violence, or all gender-based violence, and that all of it needs a transformative justice process, and I don’t know. There are different things that work for different things. A community accountability process is not the same as a transformative justice practice. A transformative justice practice is how we have our own movement security at demos, marches, and rallies. And how we have a bad dates sheet in the sex trade to track fucked-up johns. And how we have what you brilliantly talked about, that was world-changing for me, around community restraining orders. Those are so different than a community accountability process, which is a long-term transformative piece that involves lots of people working specifically on one thing that happened between two people. And then we have circles, which, now we’re like, circling for everything, and circles are really ineffective for certain things.

A CA process not only would not work, but would increase danger. Like, when the power differential is—you can’t have a community accountability process with your abusive boss in a nonprofit. The power differential is too wide.

We also have to stop acting like saying that somebody can’t be in a space is disposing of them. First and foremost, asking someone who has caused harm not to be in a space, particularly where the survivor would be, is actually a consequence of the action that they took that was harmful. It’s a consequence. It is not a punishment. A punishment would be taking this person’s liberty and locking them in a cage for three years, or a month, or ten days, because of the actions that they took. We are not taking people’s liberty through CA. We are just not.

I’ve never posited TJ as, quote, “the antidote” to the PIC [prison-industrial complex]. For me, TJ is a way to do the work that needs to happen to make sure that we’re transforming our relationships with each other because, ultimately, I hope that this helps foster the conditions necessary for a world without these horrific death-making institutions that I want to see dismantled.

Part of the problem of positing a, quote, “alternative” to the PIC is that it is impossible. What is the alternative to oppression? Do you know what I mean? Like, think about that, as an institution. What is the alternative to exploitation? Like, yes, we don’t want to exploit people! That’s the alternative. But that’s not an institution. Plus, the other thing about the alternative language is that it sets up this weird binary, whereby you now have the PIC as it stands, this horrific set of forces, institutions, etcetera.