13th Documentary Analysis

The CCI penitentiary in South Carolina is one of thousands of prisons where their intentions are to make a profit, and to handicap the African- American male. That’s the more controversial topic, not the horrendous penitentiary conditions. The concern some Americans have are ,why so many blacks being placed in prisons. American prisons are not constructed to rehabilitate an inmate. Prisons are essential for our society, but they have become vast business, for private owners. Of course, killers, and any individual that commits a heinous crime should be placed in jail. Many people sympathize with the person who is trying to prove for his family by selling drugs, to make ends meet. They should have lighter punishments in the eyes of many. The laws are systematize to where the black male never achieves his full potential as a father, provider, and a positive representative to society. The educational system in black communities is making the circumstances unfavorable, and the legal system is repeating the sequence of events. America was not intended for Africans to become America civilians.

The 13th characterize our criminal justice system and political institution as unfair and a racist system of oppression for certain color of race. This film gave me a better understanding of how the prisons were treating their prisoners. I was not aware that prisoners were forced into being treated and considered to be slaves. While watching this documentary I was able to understand that the country in which people called land of the free, it's not really the land of the freedom if this system treats prisoners as slaves. While watching the 13th I saw a particular case in which a group of African-American tennagers were arrested and accused of a crime that the system did not have concrete evidence of, but they were still arrested and spent

13th is a 2016 American documentary by director Ava DuVernay. The movie was captured and presented in the form of interviews with various people from the diverse background; from educator to politicians, from black to white, they all generally agree with the fact that mass incarceration has done nothing but damage the society and the people of color. As the movie tried to gather all the opinions and information from people with various socio-economic status, I think it is safe to assume that the primary purpose of this film is to serve the information without being polarized to one party. This movie has disenchanted people to realize that mass incarceration of people of color is a big problem. The reason why this topic has been overlooked for

The United States accounts for 5% of the world population, but our prison population makes up 25% of the world’s (Nagin, 2014). African Americans account for the largest percent of our prison population because they have the highest incarceration rate compared to other races. This essay will argue that African Americans are incarcerated at a higher rate than Caucasians. Proven by statistical data, there are grounds to establish that the racial disparity in incarceration rates is a social problem. To address this social problem, public policy should be implemented by the Federal Government.

In today’s society, discrimination is an issue that is considered to be a thing of the past. In a country with such diversity it is hard to believe that people living in the “land of the free” face issues of racism. This paper will focus specifically on the social problem of mass incarceration of minority groups and how the criminal justice system targets these groups. Although this social problem can be linked to specifically African Americans, the impacts of mass incarceration can be felt by almost everyone. I have chosen three articles that focus on how the criminal justice system is masking mass imprisonment a major problem in minority communities.

The cost of living is always on the rise, so naturally the cost of maintaining our public prison systems and its inmates is also on the rise. Not only does the cost to maintain the prisoners alive and healthy rise; our draconian laws that seem to make youth and the African American community the target, keep sending more and more offenders into the prison system. Without acknowledging alternative solutions and rehabilitation programs that are readily available. We currently live in an age where old laws from eras long past still rule. This is to say that we still follow laws that were put in place decades ago that are racist and unjust. Many of these laws emerged from the turbulence of the 1960’s; when the increasingly rebellious college youth and African American civil rights movements looked to change the nation. Laws were put in place directed at mainly these two groups: laws such as having a 100 times larger

The documentary 13th by Ava DuVernay was a visual masterpiece. The documentary provided its viewers with an array of information that spanned throughout centuries and was eloquently executed in less than 2 hours. The central focus of the film was about how the 13th amendment shaped this country and its prison system. The 13th amendment was the building block for mass incarceration and as time has gone on, new laws and amendments strengthened the process for more people to get incarcerated. Slavery benefited the country as a whole and as the Civil War was winding down, slavery was coming to an end. As the documentary states, the South especially relied heavily on slavery for their economy to sustain. After the passing of the 13th amendment, slaves were freed and it left the South’s economy in shambles. A stipulation within the 13th amendment, that states “Neither slavery not involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been dully convicted, shall exist within the United States.” In turn, mass amounts of newly freed slaves were arrested and deemed criminals. Being criminalized reduced them back to a lower status in the United States, and unfortunately reignited slavery in a new kind of form. The film was not only educational, it also provided its viewers with knowledge about why there is such a disparity in mass incarnations amongst people of color compared to their white counterparts.

The documentary 13th featured on Netflix discusses the heavy topics of slavery and mass incarceration in our Criminal Justice System. The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution freed the slaves and prohibited slavery, unless it was a punishment for a crime. Making criminals an exception to this protection made them slaves to the state, again. There has been an immense continuation of slavery through the criminalization of behavior of African Americans in our society and through our Criminal Justice System practices. Convict leasing, lynchings, disenfranchisement, Jim Crow, and the War on Drugs are all systems of oppression that can be seen in today's practices that allow for this perpetuation of slavery, currently recognized as mass incarceration.

The disproportionate numbers of African Americans in the prison system is a very serious issue, which is not usually discussed in its totality. However, it is quite important to address the matter because it ultimately will have an effect on African Americans as a whole.

The mass incarceration of African Americans has been for years, racially pushed forward. In recent years this crisis of disproportional inequality has reached farther into the African American community affecting education, housing, and health care. African Americans males specifically, have been victimized in two ways, first by being targeted more highly than another racial group in America and second by having the U.S. Criminal Justice System perpetuate a system that does not allow them to be the ones who have any power to change their unequal treatment. Because of racial inequality and a history of social oppression, African American males have been treated unequally, entering jails at a higher rate than any other racial group.

Racial inequality extends beyond socioeconomic measures: it shapes social interactions. Filmmaker Ava DuVernay explores the history of racial inequality in the United States, focusing on the fact that the nation’s prisons are disproportionately filled with African-Americans. The film begins with the fact: “the U.S. is known to hold five percent of the world’s population,” then sharpens into the idea of although this is true, the U.S. also hold “twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners” (00:00:23-00:00:30). 13th is based on the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which abolished slavery but also included a provision, which the documentary brings to light (00:01:53-00:05:45). The documentary touches on chattel slavery, D.W. Griffith’s

African American’s make up nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population, and they are incarcerated at nearly 6 times the rate of whites. (NAACP, 2009-2015) There are many reasons that play a factor in racial disparities in jails and prisons, and although some of these reasons are out of our control, some hold room for major reform. In order to understand why there is such disparity, we need to look at all of the possible contributing factors, and in order to make changes, we need to start from the bottom and work our way up.

American has a legacy of the mistreatment and disenfranchisement of African Americans. The same bad treatment that many think only took place in the past is in fact still intact, it’s just presented in a new way. The mass incarceration of blacks in the Unites States can be attributed to the “racial hierarchy” that has always existed. The U.S contributes to about 5% of the worlds overall population, and about 25% of the worlds prison population (Holland 1), “if those rates reflected jail, probation and parole populations, the numbers would rise exponentially”(Griffith 9). Statics show that there is a chance that about 1 in 3 black males are expected end up in prison (Jacobson). Although, in terms of the entire United States population African Americans only make up about 13% (Prison Activist Resource Center. Racism Fact Sheets: “ Latinos and the Criminal Injustice System.” 2003). There is a huge number of African Americans involved in the criminal justice system in some way. The average person does not know about mass incarceration nor about the racism that is in just about every part of the criminal justice system. When most people think about racism their thoughts often drift to slavery or Jim Crow laws, but for most, they do not consider how the amount of African Americans in prison today could be due to bias or racism. A significant cause of mass incarceration is the same racism that produced the Jim Crow era.

The United States accounts for 5% of the world population, but the nation’s prison population makes up 25% of the world’s (Nagin, 2014). African Americans comprise the largest percent of the United States prison population because they have the highest incarceration rate compared to other races. This essay will argue that African Americans are incarcerated at a higher rate than Caucasians. Proven by statistical data, there are grounds to establish that the racial disparity in incarceration rates is a social problem. To address this social problem, public policy should be implemented by the government at the state level.

There are so many more African-Americans than whites in our prisons that the difference cannot be explained by higher crime among African- Americans - racial discrimination is also at work, and it penalizes African- Americans at almost every juncture in the criminal justice system.1