Mass Incarceration In 13th

Male incarceration “is a massive system of racial and social control.” (Michelle Alexander, 2014 ) The world we live in today is 5% of the world’s population however, 25 % are prisoners meaning one out of every 4 humans are incarcerated or will be. Now one must question how this epidemic continues to grow. Let’s start by looking into what the 13th amendment did for the African American community for generations to come. “The 13th amendment grants freedom to all, except for criminals.” ( Michelle Alexander, 2014) With that being documented it gave the nation a tool to throw us behind bars for years to come. With Nixon’s administration coining the term “war on drugs” the destruction of the black community began. During the 1970’s the

The Netflix documentary film 13th is about the prison system of the United States and the injustices that stem from mass incarceration, particularly those felt by African American communities. The film details the last century of ethnic discrimination and injustice faced by the African American population of the United States, and went into particular detail of the last few decades that gave rise to the systems of mass incarceration that are seen the U.S. today. The film was shot in an incredibly edgy style that I personal found distracting, there were many unconventional shots while interviewees were making statements, and interviewees with opinions at odds with the message of the film were not given an opportunity to fully express their views.

The author discusses the price that US minority communities pay and the mass incarceration and the ideologies that fuel them. Interestingly, the author believes that mass incarceration only affects a certain group of people. Mass incarceration targets minority groups. These minority groups are characterized as low-income people. The author believes, that action has been taken to rectify the percentage of incarceration, because their low power compared to the majority. In addition, the authors go into percentages that depict that African American and Hispanic are targeted. Furthermore, the author looks at the ideologies that pertain to mass incarceration. Due to social injustice in the low-income communities presents negative ramifications

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

This targeting led to the incarceration, imprisonment, chain gangs, prison farms and other correctional facilities for tens of thousands of African American men, women, and children.” The idea of mass incarceration being used to systematically oppress black people has traveled to the surface with Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, and Taylor talks about the effect of mass incarceration. In the book, Alexander highlights that the majority of the African American men are either in prison or have some type of criminal record making it unable for them to vote and get jobs. Alexander describes the criminal justice systems as the “New Jim Crow,” a modern type of oppression for African Americans. Mass incarceration rate skyrocketed during the Drug War and many African American were jailed for several years for petty crimes, shown in the documentary 13th by Ava DuVernay. Alexander book shows the oppression of African American and is a statement to change our criminal justice system that is targeted to victimize African Americans. Ultimately, Taylor points out that not only do the police have the power to destroy your body, but by using their power to charge African American men for petty crimes they able to effectively keep African Americans in a lower-class status, supporting the white suprematist view manifested in our police force.

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander tries to advance intellectual dialogue regarding mass incarceration in the United States. Alexander does this by carrying out a historical analysis of the process in which the correctional system controls African Americans through intentionally selected, and systematically sanctioned legal limits. In fact, the United States incarceration rate is not at peak by coincidence. Moreover, it is not coincidental that Black men and women make up the majority of this number. According to Alexander, this problem is a consequence of the “New Jim Crow” rules, which use racial stratification to eliminate black individuals in the legal sense. Black people and a small number of the Hispanic community face racial stratified laws when they face the justice system. This paper will support the claims that race is a major factor in the incarceration of black men in the United States, which includes the Jim Crow system, the slave system and the drag war. This process will also involve analyzing of some of the arguments presented within the book.

June 19th, 1865 two and a half years after president Abraham lincoln announced the abolishment of slavery and the last slaves in Texas were set free. Unfortunately slavery did not end there, the Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery on land and created slavery in jails. In the 20th century the jails population was a flatline until the early 1970s the era named “war on drugs” which created a mass incarceration. In the 1970’s the U.S jail population was around 357,292 incarcerated but due to mass incarceration by the 1990’s the jail population was up to 1,179,200.

The documentary “13th” is very telling about the problems with the prison system and society's view of African-Americans. After the end of slavery, the economy too a hit because of the lack of labor needed for the industries. To solve this problem, people turned to prison workers, because it was cheap labor that weren’t protected under the 13th Amendment. This amendment abolished slavery and indentured servitude, but left the clause of criminal punishment. Because of this loophole, and because whites were very much still in control of society soon after the 13th Amendment was passed, police forces began going after African-Americans in order to fill prisons and satisfy work forces.

To dig deeper into this overrepresentation of black criminality, we have to look at the loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment, which allowed slavery as a form of punishment in the prison system. The policymakers recognized the opportunities to acquire forced labor through mass incarceration and made use of the perpetuating cycle of racial formation, where representations and the actions of the institution often reinforce each other. The structural institution, or the policymakers in this case, used overrepresentation of black criminality to racialize crime. The overrepresentation of racialized crime then validates the need of criminal laws and their unequal application across racial groups. In the end, the institution created the false representation that justifies its actions which further feed the representation. The vicious cycle introduced racial discrimination into the justice system and guided the process of mass incarceration.

It is a widespread notion that the Thirteenth Amendment ended the unconstitutional enslavement of African Americans in the United States, declaring "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” Most Americans, however, do not take note of the loophole placed in the famed Thirteenth Amendment- slavery was deemed unconstitutional with the exception of being used as a ‘punishment for crime’. Michelle Alexander examines this loophole in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, arguing how mass incarceration has replaced slavery and Jim Crow to reduce black Americans to a second class status. Through

Many Americans, White and Black alike, think of prison as being one of the worst places on Earth. 13th further consolidates this viewpoint, but highlights the inequality within the justice system, as well as outside of it. The documentary covers the controversial topic of discrimination in the criminal justice system while emphasizing the government’s involvement in enforcing this discrimination through policies. 13th by Ava DuVernay has a strong use of the rhetoric pathos to portray the negative treatment of African-Americans in the criminal justice system; however, bias resides in the documentary, thus weakening the argument. DuVernay's use of pathos in 13th helps persuade the audience in her favor.

Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness goes into great detail on race related issues that were specific to black males, the mass incarceration, and how that lead to the development of institutionalized racism in the United States. She compares the Jim Crow with recent phenomenon of mass incarceration and points out that the mass incarceration is a network of laws, policies, customs and institutions that have been working together to warrant the subordinating status of black males. In this paper I will go into a brief examination of the range of issues that she mentions in her book that are surrounding the mass incarceration of black male populations.

The criminalization of African Americans was further developed into the increased rate of incarceration after the abolishment of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment in 1863 outlawed slavery in America, stating that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." (U.S. Constitution. Amend. XIII, sec.1) However, the amendment leaves out the exception that if a person is a criminal, he or she can be possibly used as a slave. The South seized the chance by replacing slavery by black codes, and as a part of the black codes, the Vagrancy laws forced freedman to do hard labor, and “if so-called

Our group chose the topic of mass incarceration because it is extremely relevant in this day and age. There are hundreds of thousands of American citizens that have been incarcerated for a variety of crimes. When mass incarceration was first introduced it was unknowingly supporting the “War on Drugs”, which we will go into more detail in the paper. The war on drugs inevitably became a war on people. The penalties of carrying different types of drugs became more severe, and those who were caught by the police were minority groups especially young African American men. The consequences of mass incarceration occur in more than just a jail cell. Once prisoners are released, it is extremely difficult to become employed once there is a conviction following your name. Even as supporters of The Black Lives Matter Movement protested against the unfair treatment of African Americans, those who resisted against authorities were imprisoned. Throughout this paper we will see the sociological perspective of mass incarceration on todays society.

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.