Why does Django return postgres JSONField value as string?

Turns out you cannot use django-jsonfield and Django's native JSONField in the same project or will you run into the weird behavior as described in the question

https://bitbucket.org/schinckel/django-jsonfield/issues/57/cannot-use-in-the-same-project-as-djangos

For me the problem was that the database was created from a backup and the column type was set to text when it should have been either json or jsonb.

Cleaning any invalid json then altering the column type with the following:

ALTER TABLE t ALTER COLUMN j TYPE jsonb USING j::text::jsonb;

(thanks to https://stackoverflow.com/a/28076909/2362877)