“13th” Documentary Report
The name of the documentary “13th” refers to the Thirteenth Amendment of the US Constitutions which outlawed slavery but left a loophole in it allowing it as a punishment for a crime committed. This loophole permitted the slavery to creep back into American society under the guise of mass incarceration. Many African American civil rights organizations fight against it but fail because instead of fighting the real cause of mass
incarceration, they bid for power and avoid the issues our society deems “shameful.”
The roots of the modern day mass incarceration can be traced back to the middle of 19 century. After the Civil war, no one knew what to do with the liberated slaves who were mostly agricultural laborers, so they were
arrested and imprisoned for the slightest of offenses like vagrancy, for example. Prisons, at the same time, could lease their convicts to private parties as laborers, thus making them slaves in nature if not in name, working for free and receiving accommodation, food and clothes in return. Later, Jim Crow laws segregated African Americans from the rest of population, assigned an inferior status to them and made them outlaws in the country, allowing white people to kill them with impunity for any wrong done, real or imaginary. Movies like “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) portrayed black people as predatory, unintelligent and sexually aggressive and KKK as a romantic organization, fighting for justice, yet president Wilson had a private screening of it at the White House. Even the Voting Act of 1965 did not stop the covert enslavement because the techniques to implement it are constantly changing and the new system of slavery is quick to adjust to the current situation.
The makers of the “13th” demonstrated it using statistics and real life examples. In 1970 the prison population in the United States was 357,292 and in 2014 – 2,306,200. The long lasting US policies on legislation led to it: the war on drugs, Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, the “three strikes” law – all of these were designed to increase the prison population. The reason for this is simple, say the filmmakers, it's very profitable to keep many people in prison. And it's not about prison labor, though it still exists, and companies like Victoria's Secret, Boeing and JC Penny use it to advertise merchandise “made in the USA.” The real profits lay in owning and managing private prisons. It brings a lot of lucrative contracts for correction companies and make them push for longer sentences and stricter laws in the US.
They do it through the organization called ALEC – American Legislative Exchange Council, which is a private club for the politicians and private corporations. The “three-strikes” law, the mandatory minimum sentences laws
are all traced back to ALEC, and CCA (Correction Corporation of America) was one of the members until recently. Sentencing a lot …
