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Quote by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

“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. Real time transformation requires stating your needs and setting functional boundaries. Transformative justice requires us at minimum to ask ourselves questions like these before we jump, teeth bared, for the jugular. I think this is some of the hardest work. It's not about pack hunting an external enemy, it's about deep shifts in our own ways of being. But if we want to create a world in which conflict and trauma aren't the center of our collective existence, we have to practice something new, ask different questions, access again our curiosity about each other as a species.”

Quote by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Book:Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
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Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

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“The existing criminal justice model poses two main questions in the face of social harm: Who did it? How can we punish them? (And increasingly, how can we make money from it?). Creating safe and healthy communities requires a different set of questions: Who was harmed? How can we facilitate healing? How can we prevent such harm in the future? --S. Lamble”

Transformative JusticePrison Industrial ComplexPrison Abolition
Book:Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex
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“Instead of appealing to a fear of consequences, community accountability appeals to higher values and aligns self-interest with the collective good. In CI's limited experience, liberatory goals were required to guide the process, since pragmatism could lead to the use of coercion or threatened or real violence as temporary measures for assuring the stability and safety needed to make further steps possible However, the pervasiveness of punishment as a model for accountability and the association of the term "accountability" with retribution contributed to difficulties in moving beyond this mode of engagement. Thus, a practice such as banning, which makes a modicum of safety possible while mobilizing for a more engaged process, can become an end rather than a means. (Mimi Kim)”

PunishmentAccountabilityRepairTransformative Justice
Book:Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
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“If folks do the same thing over and over and over again, and refuse to take accountability for that, and don't want to learn, they can actually be banned from a particular space. We do have to figure out the other side of that. Which is, somebody does take accountability, and does what people asked them to do. When are they allowed to rejoin community in good standing? That is something we have yet to figure out how to do in consistent fashion. Because you're never gonna be able to say somebody "You can never come back to society," and expect those people to join accountability processes.”

ReformAccountabilityTransformative Justice
Book:Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
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“People should not be talking about social media and "real life" as though they're distinct. They are not. What is happening online is happening offline, and what is happening offline is happening online. What happens offline bleeds into the online world, and vice versa.”

TechnologyInternetSocial MediaOnlineInternet CultureTransformative Justice
Book:Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
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“People mess up. We lie, exaggerate, betray, hurt, and abandon each other. When we hear that this has happened, it makes sense to feel anger, pain, confusion, and sadness. But to move immediately to punishment means that we stay on the surface of what has happened. To transform the conditions of the "wrongdoing", we have to ask ourselves and each other, "Why?" Even--especially--when we are scared of the answer. It's easy to decide a person or group is shady, evil, psychopathic. The hard truth (hard because there's no quick fix) is that long-term injustice creates most evil behavior. The percentage of psychopaths in the world is just not high enough to justify the ease with which we assign that condition to others. In my mediations, "why?" is often the game-changing, possibility-opening question. That's because the answers rehumanize those we feel are perpetuating against us. "Why?" often leads us to grief, abuse, trauma, mental illness, difference, socialization, childhood, scarcity, loneliness. Also, "Why?" makes it impossible to ignore that we might be capable of a similar transgression in similar circumstances. We don't want to see that.”

QuestioningQuestionsSelf ReflectionWhyTransformative Justice
Author:Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
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