"Neither slavery or involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States." 13th Amendment to the US Constitution
13th, a documentary by Ava DuVernay (director of SELMA), begins with a stark statistic.
The United States holds 5 percent of the world's population, but 25 percent of its prisoners.
13th (titled after the 13th amendment) seeks to answer the question: Why?
DuVernay picks up the story after the Civil War, making a case that targeted incarceration of blacks began as a means to rebuild the Southern economy.
Lynchings became increasingly more common during the Reconstruction era, setting the stage for Jim Crow legislation, a series of state and local laws in the South that enforced racial segregation.
The "separate but equal" status they sought to justify was anything but.
In 1954 the US Supreme Court struck down segregation in public schools, but the practice still remained. Causing Martin Luther King Jr. to comment years later, "Justice too long delayed is justice denied."
13th makes the point that after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, mass incarceration of blacks began. Prior to that time, the incarceration rate had been flat, but the sheer volume of people in prison speaks to the point: In 1970 there were 357,292 people in prisons across the US. By 1985 that number had increased to 759,100. And by 1980 there were 1.1 million people in prison.
A big part of the reason for the increase was the infamous "War on Drugs" started during the Nixon Administration. 13th makes a case that the War On Drugs turned drug addiction to a crime issue rather than a social issue.
A decade later, Ronald Reagan took the economic inequality that existed among the races, bringing the War on Drugs to another level, instilling a fear and law-and-order attitude in relating to inner city communities. During this time period (mid to late 1980s) criminologists coined the term "super predators" in an attempt to identify minority members who committed crimes.
The effect of this stereotyping was plainly evident. "We make them their crime" said Bryan Stevenson, head of the Equal Justice Initiative. "You have then educated a public, deliberately, over decades to believe that black men in particular, and black people in general, are criminals."
The administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton featured the continuance of the get-tough-on-crime message. (Bush pushed for and signed the Crime Control Act of 1990, while Clinton pushed for and signed the Violent Crime Control & Law Enforcement Act of 1994). And the number of people in prison continued to grow. From 1,179,200 in 1990 to 2,015,300 in 2001.
During President Clinton's tenure in office, in particular, he signed into law a bill that helped fuel further expansion of the prison system, and eventual privatization of it, making it a multi-million dollar industry. Of that bill, Clinton was to later admit: "I made a mistake. I signed a bill that made the problem worse."
In 2014 the US prison population was 2,306,200. (Keep in mind that 40% of those incarcerated in prisons across the country are black.) Even though the incarceration rate has leveled off in the past year, 13th points out that if you are a black man, you have a one in three chance of being incarcerated.
As an example of how police can target minorities, before Ferguson became famous, there was an average of 3 warrants per household in the city, which is 67 percent black. An investigation found that most of these warrants were for minor offenses.
13th ends with a visual montage of disturbing images of photos of slaves with scars from whippings and lynchings to civil rights marches. The narrator says "This is what segregation looks like."
The final quote of the documentary comes from Bryan Stevenson, who takes the part of a person who asks: "How could you have tolerated slavery and lynchings? Segregation? If I had been living in a time like that, I would never have tolerated it." Stevenson goes on to make the point, "But the truth is we are living in a time like that, and we are tolerating it."
Throughout the film, DuVernay includes several experts to back up the points her film makes, including Stevenson, Jelani Cobb (Professor of African-American Studies at the University of Connecticut), Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Professor of History at Harvard University), John Hagan (Professor of Sociology & Law at Northwestern University), Malkia Cyril (Director of Center for Media Justice) and Charles Rangel (Congressman from New York City).
DuVernay's documentary isn't easy to watch, but it remains engaging and necessary in its straightforward examination of the incarceration system in the US.
Here's the trailer to 13th.
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