In 2018, TAVP partnered with Texas Advocates for Justice, a criminal justice reform advocacy group led by formerly incarcerated people and their families, to continue the Life and Death in a Carceral State documentation project with a series of interviews on the impacts of incarceration on individuals and families.
There are tales, perhaps apocryphal, of heart recipients adopting the mannerisms of the organ donors whose hearts now beat in their cracked chests. There was the meat-hating vegetarian who, after leaving the hospital, began craving chicken nuggets, a favorite food of the boy whose heart lay beneath her healing ribs.
Four years ago, I quit a well-paying job in search of something I knew no employer could offer. I think I finally found what I was looking for. The answers are in Mariame Kaba’s new book “We Do This ’Til We Free Us.” But first, let’s rewind.
Several Governors have opposed prioritizing vaccinating incarcerated individuals in their state vaccine plans. This conviction is framed within a question of whether incarcerated individuals are “deserving” of safety ahead of fellow state residents that were not convicted of breaking the law.
Recognizing the intrinsic worth of individuals is a cost/benefit exercise to Texas politicians, a truth driven home during calamities. Political calculations are always utilitarian, more so when the choices are falsely couched as between a legal application of the state’s apparatus of punishment or the granting of mercy.
In Spring 2020, a deadly virus pandemic and a rash of police assaults on Black bodies arrived in America with bold synergy, impacting public consciousness, commandeering attention. These phenomena have pushed us out of our nested places in routine systems to look at our nation’s big picture. They have evoked what Dr. King called the “fierce urgency of now.”
I came to Texas in 2011, with no plan or intention of staying. I am here today, nearly ten years later, because this is where I was living when my sister died.
Jennifer Toon is a journalist and advocate from East Texas, currently living and writing in Austin. Toon 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.
Story involves memory and it’s through the process of having our participants share their story that our organization continues to ponder what our work creates. Asking others to tell their stories is to invite complexity in the moment. Story acts as a form of soft power and holds the potential to surface insight and grow connection.
It’s been hard to concentrate on anything the last few weeks as the Covid-19 pandemic spreads through our communities, the US, and the world. We feel helpless sitting at home, or at our desks, when all we can do is bear witness from a distance to the mass suffering, loss, and grief happening all around us.
A system becomes trauma-organized when the method it uses in trying to reach its goals becomes a barrier to those goals — compounding and multiplying harm in its attempts to right a wrong. Our current criminal justice system traumatizes and re-traumatizes those that are affected by criminal violence, police investigations, trials, and incarceration.
A former mitigation specialist still remembers the wife of a death row inmate who broke down in tears as he met with her to go over an affidavit for her husband’s defense case. Late into the night, his role shifted from a researcher for the defense team to an ad-hoc support person, although there was little he could do other than sit quietly with her and listen.
© 2023 | Texas After Violence Project
