Ava Duvernay Essay

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.

Julie Taymor, a director and playwright, was the first women to a Tony Award. Her works in opera, theater, and film has gotten her many awards, including Academy awards, an Oliver award, and much more.

Some issues it displays includes, social injustice towards the poor, wrongful convictions, and using military tactics to terrorize poor people. The high population of residence in many of the urban housing projects consist of mainly African Americans. A lot of the times, many drug raids take place in housing projects. As stated by Alfred Woodard, in the movie’s trailer, many of these people who live in housing projects are poor. The drug raids specifically take place because they know that because these people are poor, they cannot afford a lawyer which then forces them into a situation where they must plead guilty to avoid jail time whether they did it or not. With the accused pleading guilty they are raising the conviction rate of the DA’s and public defenders allowing them to get more money. This is a social problem because it falsely shows that the criminal justice system is achieving justice. Studies show that African Americans are arrested twice as much than white Americans even though the use and the distribution of drugs amongst white and African Americans are about the same (Slate,

After closely analyzing Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th, my eyes were opened as to how black people feel vs. the way white people may feel about the criminal justice system and the unfair treatment of African Americans. I was honestly disappointed with both sides because of the way the race card is used to justify our actions towards one another.

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.

In the video, it was apparent that there is a very lopsided number of minorities compared to whites in prison due to the provided fact that black men account for 40.2% of the prison population, while only contributing to 6.5% of the United States population. This percent is only one minority groups out of many more that are in prison still to this day. It was also provided in the video that one in every three African Americans are sent to prison once in their lifetime. This gives a basis of the argument that race could play a role in the deciding of sentences in court. As mention in the video, there is proof from cases that an African American have been shown to serve longer sentences than whites for the same crimes. In short, there is a lopsided number that has the background and statistics to show that there is a possibility that racism did play a role in the lopsided

There have been 100,000 African Americans in prison since Brown vs Board of education. The article states that the trend will continue, 1 of every 3 African American males are apparently born today can expect to go to prison in their time, 1 in 6 Latino males, compared to 1 in every 17 White males. But for women, it is much lower, but the ethnicity does not change: 1 out of 18 African Americans, 1 out of 45 Hispanics, and finally 1 of every 111 White females, are expected to serve some time in prison. At any given day, 1 in every 13 African American males between 30 to 39 will incarcerated in a state or federal prison on any given day. This compares to the demographics of the group because in communities of color they are not affected only by incarceration but by high

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.

In Chapter 5 of "The New Jim Crow" Michelle Alexander described mass incarceration as being normalized and the system "requires no justification". She believes that 'prisoners and those in the system are out of sight and out of mind. This makes the system more durable and harder to eradicate.' Alexander, explains the three-stage set up in the system. She describes them as the roundup, formal control and invisible punishment. She describes the steps as something that most people know but don't truly understand. She describes and includes racial indifference, which was nice because it's not just blacks like with Jim Crow but all races. Alexander also describes things like drunk driving which is considered a "white" crime and drug dealers/users is considered a "black" crime get different press from authority. While Jim Crow punished others for who they are, mass incarceration punishes people for what they do even small offences get extremely hard sentencing.

Our justice system advocates a tough on crime perspective. Society has named those who are innocently incarcerated as predatory criminals, giving them that label has made us separate ourselves from them. Most of the “criminals” that are incarcerated are poor black or Hispanic men. This is an example of how much racial disparities exist in mass incarceration. According to Bruce Western, one in three African Americans will be incarcerated at one point in their life. There has always been a stigma in our country toward black men. Society in our country has always seen them as the outsiders, denying them jobs. There is also a link between failure in education and imprisonment. According to Bruce Western, sixty percent of black males that drop out of high school will experience incarceration before they reach thirty-five. Sixty percent is a large number, this is more than half. Prison is designed to keep crime under control, however, those who get thrown into prison are charged with crimes that they don't commit. Black men are often targeted because of the racial bias in our criminal justice system. We see it all the time in movies, in books, on media. The Black Lives Matter Movement started because all this racial bias has been given a platform on social media. Michelle Alexander labels mass incarceration “The New Jim Crow” because of how often or criminal justice system is racist against black men. However, black men are not the only ones being targeted, Hispanics are also being targeted. Tony N. Brown, a professor of sociology at Rice

Two million African Americans are presently under the criminal-justice system, in prison, or on probation. The past few decades, millions of more people have been in and out of the System. To be 100 percent; nearly 70 percent of people released from prison are re-arrested within three years. Most people appreciate that millions of African Americans were locked into a second-class status during slavery and Jim Crow. These earlier systems of racial control made a reminder of Political, social, and economic discrimination that this nation is still haven’t overcome. This non-ending; disturbing issue to this day; has a widely effect many families and communities. Prisoners are released and fear is increased.

“The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our nation’s capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison” (Alexander, 2012). The numbers tell the story better than words can: black people are more likely to go to prison than any other race in the United States, shown by the fact that more than 60% of the prison population is composed of people of color (The Sentencing Project, 2016). These statistics can be traced back to several different cause, including the Era of Jim Crow and the War on Drugs, both of which led to higher policing in minority areas.

The biggest issue that Hollywood currently is facing is its lack of diversity both in front of and behind the camera. Very few opportunities are offered to minorities in the entertainment industry, so it needs to be celebrated when someone who lacks the same chances as a white male is able to make their voice heard. Director Ava DuVernay is one of those artist who refused to be silenced. Ava is a black female director, screenwriter, film marketer, and film distributer. The majority of her narrative films feature black female characters that are navigating their way through life and learn about themselves as they go along. She began her film career with a music documentary and worked

In the film African Americans are portrayed as criminals and treated horribly. According to the documentary “The war on drugs was a war on color” this is true because the video it mentions that African americans were arrested for minor crimes like position of weed for example. The war on drugs was a way for the government to arrest people of color. The war on drugs was not a war on drugs and did not help to get drugs off the streets which was it was supposed to do. In the film it also mentions that 1:17 white people were put in prison for life and 1:3 African Americans were put in jail for life.

She explicitly depicts the life of a convicted criminal from first prison sentence to death. She shows the deaths and imprisonment of innocent colored men and women who were merely victims of racism and unfortunate circumstance. Duvernay also showcases how hard it is to stay out of jail after being released, one expert even saying that we have a system that profits from people come back to jail over and over again. Thirteenth peels away the glowering title of criminal to reveal how we treat these people as second class citizens when we should be working to make their lives better and keep them away from crime. The prison system in America with it’s pursuit of profit shows how unjust it is to allow corporations to run these centers for rehabilitation and