The Transformative Justice Journal (TJJ), founded in 2012, is an online, open-source, and peer-reviewed journal dedicated to promoting transformative justice. As an academic-activist journal, TJJ was developed out of scholarly and community dialogues around promoting social justice community-based alternatives to both the retributive and utilitarian punishment models used by criminal justice systems, which victimize offenders and re-victimize survivors of offenses. The current punitive criminal justice system takes control, responsibility, healing, and accountability away from victims and offenders and instead gives them a powerless and victimizing experience. Transformative justice, however, views conflict not from the lens of the criminal justice system, but from the community; as such, those involved in the conflict are seen as individuals rather than victims or offenders. Moreover, transformative justice addresses oppression by systems of domination, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, elitism, classism, and ableism within all domestic, interpersonal, global, and community conflicts. Transformative justice expands the social justice model, which challenges and identifies injustices, in order to create organized processes of addressing and ending those injustices. Transformative justice and social justice work together in addressing this need. Transformative justice also builds off the principles of restorative justice in order to address experiences of oppression within mediation. TJJ’s mission is not only to identify and challenge the current punitive and retributive criminal justice system, but to end all forms of oppression and punishment within society. TJJ also aims to go beyond theory by promoting transformative initiatives and offering practical and actionable strategies for change in a plain-speaking theory-to-action publication.
