Interview with Jennifer Toon

Interview with Jennifer Toon

Jennifer Toon is a journalist from East Texas with 27 years of system involvement. She wrote for the state prison newspaper, The Echo, for over ten years, and as a freelance writer she has published work with The Texas Observer, The Marshall Project, and the Guardian. In this interview, Toon offers a personal perspective on how her lived experiences influence her current journalism and advocacy. She discusses how important it is for peer support to come from actual peers, highlighting the concept of “nothing for us without us.” The specific issues she touches on include nuances of the female experience behind bars, the familial community built during her years there, and the irreplaceable importance of maintaining connections to the outside while locked inside. Toon also outlines the most pressing objectives she hopes to highlight during COVID. She can speak directly to the ways that the virus has escalated injustices happening in prisons because of her close contact to many of those still incarcerated. (Line break) Despite the atrocities that she is regularly hearing and writing about, Toon offers the optimistic perspective that hardships can be shaped into tools to help self or others. In this interview, and throughout all her writings, Toon maintains positivity without denial of how severely problematic the system can be. Some of her articles, including ones discussed in this interview, can be found at https://muckrack.com/jennifer-toon/articles. This interview was conducted virtually by Murphy Anne Carter on August 10, 2020.

Jennifer Toon

Texas After Violence Project

08 July 2020

Murphy Anne Carter, Casey Herz, Emily Henry

public -- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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.mp4

English

interview

tav00101

North America--United States--Texas

Vimeo

Murphy Anne Carter

Jennifer Toon

Remote

mp4

1:16:23