This is a provocative, revealing movie you must see
If you are committed to shutting down the school-to-prison pipeline, “13th” is a must-see documentary.
The film is up for an Academy Award (and if there is any justice, it will win) for its provocative, revealing, look at how the United States, with only 5 percent of the world’s population, came to incarcerate 25 percent of the world’s population.
Director Ava DuVernay connects the dots between slavery, Reconstruction, convict leasing, the Southern Strategy, the law-and-order regime that emerged during the Civil Rights Movement, the crackdown on nonviolent drug offenses and the rise of the prison-industrial complex.
The film even examines the influence of ALEC, the group whose corporate members write model bills to suit their profits, then pass them along to state legislators who turn those model bills into laws. Aside from promoting mass incarceration, ALEC has also pushed voucher legislation.
The one aspect of this complex issue DuVernay’s film did not examine was something many of us are familiar with: zero-tolerance policies, the assigning of explicit, predetermined and often severe punishments to specific violations of school rules, without taking into account the situation or context.
The film looks at mass incarceration through the lens of the 13th Amendment:
“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.”
It’s the clause in the middle, the film explains, that has pushed our prison population to more than 2.3 million people—nearly 1 million of whom are African American.
“That number includes people in 1,800 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 942 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,283 local jails, and 79 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, and prisons in U.S. territories,” a report by the Prison Policy Initiative says.
The film explains how people are frequently incarcerated not because they’ve been convicted, but because they are This is a provocative, revealing movie you must see - Lily's Blackboard:
