“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.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“When we define ourselves, the result is complexity. We are none of us one thing, neither good nor bad. We are complex surviving organisms. We do appalling things to each other, rooted in trauma. We survive, we learn.”
― Ejeris Dixon, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“I cherish the ways we have shown up for each other, and honor the ways we've failed and made mistakes. Our stories are sacred.”
― Ejeris Dixon, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“It's like that quote I've seen on the Internet lately: 'Trauma creates change you don't choose. Healing is about creating change you do choose.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“Because the revolution starts at home, as they say. The revolution starts in your house, in your own relationships, in your bedroom. The revolution starts in your heart.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“I do not need to dictate the strategies surviving family members should use. Instead, I find ways to support them that are in line with my politics because I know that just as punishment does not transform behavior, neither does judgment.

When we make judgment into one of our primary organizing strategies, we reduce the trust needed to create safety.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“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.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“It was a gift to get to be accountable and not a punishment.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“Most people doing transformative justice work didn't get into it because we thought it would be a random, fun thing to do. We do it because we're survivors, or the people closest to us are. We care about survivors; we know what it's like to survive brutal shit, often alone. We want to change the world so this stuff never happens again.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“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)”
― Ejeris Dixon, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“It is absolutely true that people who harm people were also harmed. I know people sometimes don't want to hear that. I know that makes people mad, people feel like that's an excuse, whatever. But I, with every fiber of my being, the both/and harm and survivorship really sits with me all the time. Cause there's not one person I've worked with who harmed other people that was not also deeply and profoundly harmed themselves in some other context. (Mariame Kaba)”
― Ejeris Dixon, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“I know for a fact that we can't heal or hurt alone. We must heal or hurt in relationship with other people. (Mariame Kaba)”
― Ejeris Dixon, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“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.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“I want to see how people can operationalize kindness online. It would be good for people to take that as a value from which to work, before launching into things that are about destruction and about vilification.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“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.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“In order to radically transform the way in which our societies function, and to have true sovereignty and liberation, that it would require deep, deep healing. I do see transformative justice work as necessary for sovereignty and liberation. In order to be able to govern ourselves, we have to be able to hold ourselves accountable in loving and ways that are not harmful or create more violence.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“I want to start to dream about what transformative justice looks like when someone who causes harm is disabled. I want there to be something - anything - that isn't ableist written about the intersections of neurodivergence or psych disabilities and being someone who's caused harm.

Right now, if someone talks about how our psych disabilities or neurodiversity are intertwined in some way with how we've caused harm, either people fall into apologism: "they have psych disabilities, you can't blame them," or we're seen as monsters: "they have THAT disorder, they're toxic, stay away from them." Mostly, it's the latter, and the ableist demonization of people with psych disabilities as killers and monsters leaves no room for us to really talk about what happens when we are Mad and might cause harm.

I want something else. I want anti-ableist forms of accountability that don't throw disabled people who cause harm under the bus, into every stereotype about "crazed autistic"/"psychotic"/"multiple personalities abusive killers." Instead, I want us to create accountability recommendations that are accessible to our disabilities and neurodivergence.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“Change happens really slowly over time, and we have to have compassion for ourselves and each other in the long term, and that there's painful, painful setbacks.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“I do think I've seen the generation that I've seen grow up have different resources, have different skills and options around dealing with that harm, and that makes a difference for me.

But I did have a hope that like, OK, we had to go through all this stuff, but at least we can have this set of children that we can see from here, this set of children that we are raising in this context and they will not have to go through things that are very similar.

And they have gone through things that are very similar, and that is something that, you know, intellectually, we understand that these things are intergenerational cycles of violence, and it's really hard to accept that it will be incrementally different, but not totally gone within the span of a decade or two.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“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.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“This...feels particularly important in the age of social media, where we can make our pain viral before we even had a chance to feel it.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“If the only thing I can learn from a situation is that some humans do bad things, it's a waste of my precious time -- I already know that.

What I want to know is: What can this teach me/us about how to improve our humanity?”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“For many of us, our survivorhood and our neurodivergence are pretty damn intertwined. As disabled TJ workers, we know what it's like to inhabit secret bodymind stories that many turn away from, as "too much", and that knowledge helps us in our TJ work - people trust us with their survivor stories because they can tell we've seen some shit.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“When the response to mistakes, failures, and misunderstandings is emotional, psychological, economic, and physical punishment, we breed a culture of fear, secrecy, and isolation.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“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?”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“By facing our shame, we can begin to free ourselves from the inferiority we have internalized, reclaiming our agency and taking bolder actions for social justice and right relationship with our planet. Confronting our shame can also unstick us from the immobilization of privilege, allowing us to join in the solidarity and interdependence our spirits long for. What mistakes might you need to face in order to trust yourself? What hurts are you carrying that remain unmourned?”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“Remembering that one of the primary goals of our work is relationship building, we must ask ourselves who wins when we shame survivors for using the available options when all such options are violent.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“Francisco's personal story is complex. Like my family, he lived through the brutal U.S.-backed civil war in El Salvador, experiencing imperialist political terror up close, watching his loved ones killed. Francisco has his own painful history, his own harmful patterns, his own demons to unpack, but also his own strengths. He is a powerful speaker and storyteller; he is funny, smart, and charismatic. When he has put his talents in service of his organizing and advocacy work, he is strikingly passionate and effective. On one level, he has harmed and betrayed people who trusted him. Yet on another he has demonstrated that he is willing to work to build a better world. He is a complex person, like all people, full of contradictions. I believe in a path back. I believe accountability can be a step toward greater wholeness, personally and as a movement.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“After leaving that police station I knew. I knew that the police, prison, a judge would never help me find what I was looking for. I would never be allowed to be a full person and neither would he. We would both be blamed and that blame could never move toward accountability.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

“I wrote the letters that night, and as I did, I reconciled a few things. One, I would always believe he was worth it. Two, I deserved as much support as I wanted to give to him. And three, it was not my job to take the lead in his healing.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement