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Ava DuVernay is the director of the American documentary titled 13th that was produced in the year 2016. The documentary explores the intersection between justice, race and mass incarceration in the United States. The documentary derives its name from the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States that was responsible to ending slavery in the US and therefore prohibited slavery, but with the exception of slavery as a punishment for a crime committed.

According to the documentary, slavery has been perpetuated in practices through such actions such as criminalizing behavior and as well as enabling the police to arrest poor freedmen forcing them to work for the state under convict leasing. Another act through which slavery has been perpetuated is through the suppression of the African Americans through the disfranchisement, lynching and Jim Crow. Furthermore the action of the politicians declaring a war on drugs that weigh more heavily on the minority communities as well as the continued mass incarceration of the black people in the late 20th century are also some of the acts that are clearly depicted in the documentary to have slavery perpetuated over the generations in the United States ever since the end of the American Civil war.

At the beginning of the documentary we encounter the sentiments made by President Barrack Obama that the united states are composed of a total population of 5% of the globe’s population, but 25% of the world’s prisoners are found in the United States. The statistics simply paints a picture of the number of inmates that are in the American prison system. Since the end of slavery, the American prison system can only be termed as a shame as it is a continuation of slavery and the systemic denial of freedom to the African American is tied up in the institutions. According to the documentary, the rate of incarnation in the United States might be worse than slavery as there are more African Americans that are entangled in the criminal justice system in present days than those enslaved during the 1850s.

Slavery would have been abolished in the year 1965 by the establishment of the 13th amendment, but this was not possible due to the presence of a single small clause that or but the grandfathered slavery back in for the sake of crime and punishment. The requirement explains that slavery shall no longer exist in the United States borders ‘except as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”. It is due to the presence of that clause that America has not been shying of about the exploitation of the clause to generate maximum profits ever since the enactment of the 13th amendment.

The narrative of the documentary 13th spans for decades starting with Reconstruction when the 13th, 14th, and the 15th amendments were supposed to foster the just transition of the African Americans from slavery to citizenship. Instead of the just and fair transition, the African Americans were hunted and locked up while others were shot for committing petty crimes such as loitering and vagrancy; these were the criminalization of the behaviors if the transient nature of the people of color as they looked for freedom from terror in America’s wilderness.

The period was followed by the era of Jim Crow where any of the African American who was caught trying to enjoy freedom through crossing the lines of segregation were captured and swept into the expanding industries of imprisonment as well as convict leasing. By the 1950s and 1960s the African American Civil rights activists were made or turned into criminals just because of fighting for freedom, and by the 1980s, the United States began the criminalizing en masse black people who turned into drugs namely crack. The war on drugs was strengthened by the presence of politicians such as the Democrat presidential candidate Bill Clinton who joined the war on drugs after losing to them, and this dawned to the people of color that the search and fight for true freedom were futile and that it was difficult to be achieved.

Reference

Ava DuVernay, (2016). 13th Documentary: Retrieved from: https://www.netflix.com/title/80091741