The TJLP collective has come up with a list of values that we use as guiding principles for our work, our decisions, and our organizing. We use these values to guide us through decision-making as part of our commitment to moving away from the product of organizing as being the goal of our activism and our legal work. Instead, by staying committed to our values, our goal is to honor our process.
TJLP believes that:
· The state is not working for oppressed people, especially gender non-conforming people, people of color, people with disabilities, immigrants, and poor people.
· The criminal legal system doesn’t work.
· There is a historical link between slavery, systems of domination and control, and the U.S. prison system.
· The prison industrial complex and community policing justifies and reproduces racism while preventing radical organizing among those most effected.
· Social welfare is linked to the criminal legal system.
· Transphobia is inherent in almost all legal and social services available in Chicago.
TJLP is committed to prioritizing our process. By this we mean:
· Recognizing, acknowledging and confronting our privilege.
· Developing our collective knowledge.
· Using frameworks of Abolition, Transformative Justice, and Anti-Oppression.
· Being sustainable by both cherishing individual self-care and by intentionally growing our project slowing and only growing when growth is best for us, not because it’s what we’re expected to do by outside forces.
· Celebrating the link between the work we do and our spirituality.
· Being transparent about our structure.
· Embracing being called out and criticized.
· Being flexible.
· Practicing harm reduction within our Law Project and for our clients and seeing affirming legal services as a form of harm reduction.
We want to:
· Challenge traditional funding models and creatively use resources.
· Focus on individual development as a priority over reform work.
· Resist the state as an organizing strategy while recognizing that there are limitations to doing this.
· Build leadership among those most affected by the prison industrial complex.
· Build long-term relationships and investments in our clients.
· Meet our clients where they are at with flexibility in our structure and priorities.
· Prioritize those left out of traditional models of reform (ie: trickle-down policy change).
· Focus in the intersectionality of race, class, gender, immigration, mental health and physical ability within the criminal legal system and prison industrial complex.
· Dream big about how fierce and beautiful we want the world to be!
