Aiming both to trouble and give life to ‘social work values’, three outside facilitators in a restorative justice project, which is held inside a prison, grapple with the many open questions and ongoing dilemmas that arise in collaborations with our incarcerated colleagues. We begin by exploring institutionalised control within the field of social work, acknowledging the many ways in which social workers can enact bureaucracy through the performance of expertise, creating hierarchies that undermine the self-determination of our clients. We then describe our own attempts to be reflexive practitioners, striving to be egalitarian and collaborative. We step back from our own roles as ‘outside experts’, as we allow ourselves to be guided by the leadership of our colleagues, who created and now lead the workshops. As we become more deeply involved in this work, new questions about ownership and collegiality arise.