Private prison contractors entered the market to satisfy demand as arrests and sentences increased, forming an independent group with its own economic incentives to criminalize minor activities and lengthen sentences in order to keep prisons full. The documentary states that crime was lower overall than it had been in decades, but that Republican candidates raised it to generate fear. As late as the 2016 presidential election, the eventual winner Donald Trump worked to generate fear of crime, claiming high rates in New York City, for instance, which was not true according to the documentary. After their presidential candidates lost to Republicans, Democratic politicians such as Bill Clinton joined the war on drugs.Īs a result, from the early 1970s to the present, the rate of incarceration and the number of people in prisons has climbed dramatically in the United States, while at the same time the rate of crime in the United States has continued to decline since the late 20th century. A new wave of minority suppression began, reaching African Americans and others in the northern, mid-western and western cities where many had migrated in earlier decades. Following the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s that restored civil rights, the film notes the Republican Party's appeal to southern white conservatives, including the claim to be the party to fight the war on crime and war on drugs, which began to include mandatory, lengthy sentencing.
In addition, Jim Crow legislation was passed by Democrats, to legalize segregation and suppress minorities, forcing them into second-class status. She contends they disenfranchised most black people across the South at the turn of the 20th century, excluding them from the political system (including juries), at the same time that lynching of black people by white mobs reached a peak. Southern states criminalized minor offenses, arresting freedmen and forcing them to work when they could not pay fines institutionalizing this approach as convict leasing (which created an incentive to criminalize more behavior). DuVernay contends as "systems of racial control" and forced labor from the years after the abolition of slavery to the present. It explores the economic history of slavery and post- Civil War racist legislation and practices that replaced it. This film features several activists, academics, political figures from both major US political parties, and public figures, such as Angela Davis, Bryan Stevenson, Michelle Alexander, Jelani Cobb, Van Jones, Newt Gingrich, Cory Booker, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and others. The film begins with an audio clip of President Barack Obama stating that the US had 5 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of the world's prisoners. It experienced a surge in viewership by 4,665 percent in June 2020 during the George Floyd protests. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 89th Academy Awards, and won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special at the 69th Primetime Emmy Awards. She examines the prison-industrial complex and the emerging detention-industrial complex, discussing how much money is being made by corporations from such incarcerations.ġ3th garnered acclaim from a number of film critics. The film explores the "intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States " it is titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1865, which abolished slavery throughout the United States and ended involuntary servitude except as a punishment for conviction of a crime.ĭuVernay contends that slavery has been perpetuated since the end of the American Civil War through criminalizing behavior and enabling police to arrest poor freedmen and force them to work for the state under convict leasing suppression of African Americans by disenfranchisement, lynchings, and Jim Crow politicians declaring a war on drugs that weighs more heavily on minority communities and, by the late 20th century, mass incarceration affecting communities of color, especially American descendants of slavery, in the United States.
13th is a 2016 American documentary film by director Ava DuVernay.