13th

WARNING: The content of this post might be triggering to black people living in America. Proceed with this caution in mind.

Today, I finally watched the documentary 13TH. The content of the documentary is no holds barred and it explains the crucial state of our prison industrial complex that exists in America.

I am no stranger to criticisms of the criminal justice system, although I certainly am not a qualified expert. I have written about it in the past. I also wrote about the system of power that slavery, Jim Crow and the current state of racism have on our society today and why it matters.

In short, racism is a very strong economic tool used by government to keep a system of status quo in place. I am not an expert on the matter for the following reasons: I am not black and have not lived that experience and I am not a scholar in that (or any) subject matter.

However, here's a very over-simplified tabling of the structure:

• THE ELITE (Government, CEOs, The Wealthy)
• MIDDLE CLASS WHITE PEOPLE 
• POOR WHITE PEOPLE
• PEOPLE OF COLOR (Immigrants, Muslims, black people, Latino people, you name it.

The structure of continued discrimination is important because the top class (the elite) know that if the bottom tier of middle class and poor white people ever wake up and realize that their shitty position in life is the fault of the elite, there would be a revolt. This is why strong effort is put to keeping media about people of color to a highly negative constraint. This is why strong effort is put to make sure the white conscious believes black people are criminals. That immigrants will steal our jobs and cause terror. As long as we, in the lower tier barriers, believe we have someone below us, we won't find the need to rise up. Our problem is the crime and the culture of people of color, at least, that's what they want us to believe. Again, I am not a scholar and that is why I am only able to explain it so simplistically. 

The many people interviewed in 13th, however, are scholars on the subject. They know what they are talking about and they have the resources and the research to verify it. One of the many speakers is Michelle Alexander, who authored "The New Jim Crow", which is on my list to read.

Much of the information I heard in 13TH was not particularly new information to me. I had studied it and understood most of it to be true before I had watched it. However, what it did was put in words and ways that I hadn't known how to express and it backed it up with well-researched fact.

If you are white, you need to watch this film. You to need to understand the way these structures exist and why they do. Especially if you are an "ally".

I am going to put together a few facts I learned (or re-learned) from the film:

• Slavery, of course, was an economic system and its abolish caused a fall in the economic structure. As a result, the government knew they needed to make use of the clause in the 13th amendment that allowed for forced servitude to those duly convicted of a crime. As such, after the civil war, black people were arrested en masse for even the pettiest of crimes. All of this was done to reclaim the economic structure that was lost by the abolish of slavery.
• Black criminality and the threat of violence by black people has been and still is used as a media tool. Birth of a Nation is mentioned in this film as an example of early uprising of these stereotypes to keep the system in place. The imagery of black people as animalistic and violent creatures helped justify, in the white conscious, as to why "those people" were dangerous. This was because the political establishment needed black bodies working to sustain the economic structure.
• As time went on, Jim Crow laws were developed. Gradually, states enacted laws placing black people into a permanent class of second-class citizenry. It is obvious that these policies prevented many black people from achieving what they deserved to achieve due to a lack of resources.
• In the 1970's, we saw an increase in incarceration. The film outlines the number of people in prison in 1970 as 357,292 with an increase to 513,900. This was largely due to President Richard Nixon's stance on a "war on crime" and a "war on drugs".
• President Ronald Reagan, however, took this to the next level. His policies funded more prisons and put more police on the ground to be "tough on crime". By 1985, the prison population increased to 759,100.  In 1990, crime bills were pushed further with the "super-predator" narrative and by the end of 1990 we saw a prison population of 1,179,200.
• Much of President Bill Clinton's crime bill is to blame for the systems we now have in place. Mass expansion of prison and funding, increase of policing, police militarization, truth in sentencing laws and mandatory minimum sentencing laws have created perpetual prison hood. This era's effects on imprisonment were so profound that by 2000, we saw a prison population of 2,015,300. In 2014, the population increased to 2,306,200.
• Legislative groups like ALEC combine corporations and politicians together to create legislation designed at increasing profits from criminalization. ALEC has done everything from funding prisons, supporting mandatory minimums and working to pass SB1070 in an effort to increase policing and imprisonment of immigrants. All the while, it's big corporate sponsors, like the American Bail Corporation, Walmart and The Correction Corporations of America benefit tremendously from these types of laws. (See the conflict of interest?)
• The film also addresses plea bargains and the traps that plea bargains place even innocent people charged with a crime.

It is important that this type of information becomes part of our regular conversations. The system will not change when people, namely white people, take a blind eye to it. We must be diligent in discussing how these systems hurt us and how they keep the elite in their elite status.

Did you watch 13TH? Any thoughts?

Much love,

ArchAngel O:)