Alexandra Heim

WRIT106-V

Professor Liao

4 April 2018

13th Reflection

The documentary 13th goes into the history of the 13th amendment and its faults that have

catalyzed the cultural movement that has sparked movements for over hundreds of years. Not

only have people of color been victimized for centuries, but they continue to seek justification

for the imprisonment they have faced through slavery as well as incarceration in the most recent

years. The history of African Americans and their movement from slavery to freedom has been

riddled with the idea that they must be imprisoned for being dangerous people. The perception of

Civil Rights Movements and equality is that of a danger, making it justifiable to incarceration

people of color for misdemeanors, or even just fighting for the rights they so justly deserve.

This film was created to show the transition of imprisonment that African Americans

have faced, and how unlawful the justice system truly is. They acknowledge that the justice

system has now become aware of their wrongdoings in the last couple decades, but little is being

done to help with the limitation of prisoners. The first statistic that they provide is that of how

many people of the world’s population live in the United States, which is only about five percent.

However, of that five percent, 25% of the world’s prisoners are the US’s population, making that

one in every four residents is behind bars. A statistic later reveals that one in every three African

American males with spend a part of their life in prison, while one in every 17 white males will

go to prison; moreover, this means that of the current population of 2.3 million prisoners in the

US, 40.2% is black. The scary statistics of this show that there is still a prevalent stereotype that
the African American man is a danger to society, making them more susceptible to being pulled

aside for suspicions of crimes and arrested for accusations of committing crimes.

This fear was created after the slaves were freed in the late 1800s. The southern economy

was in tatters after the Civil War, and the loss of free labor greatly impacted the economy. When

the 13th amendment was passed, the documentary explained that they were able to find a

loophole, as under this amendment no person was allowed to be kept a slave unless they were

being criminally punished. The beginning of mass incarceration set forth the beginning of “legal

slavery.” During this time, the film Birth of a Nation propelled the idea of the dangerous and

animalistic character that an African American man contained, further implementing the fear for

safety from them. It also reintroduced the KKK and the measure they set forth to persecute

African American people. This movement was followed by segregation and Jim Crow laws, War

on Crime, and the Civil Rights movements, each involved in the sentencing of African

Americans into prison for unjust laws or unequal terms. From Nixon to Clinton, the enforcement

of “war on drugs” make it more justified to arrest those who seem suspicious without concrete

evidence. This allows the mass incarceration to continue and even develop into other races such

as Latinos. The fear produced by clichés of the media, as it did with Birth of a Nation, continued

the fear that even now the subject of race is something to be feared.

The movements that African Americans carried out over the years is not something to be

overlooked. Their reasons for arrest began with the outcry of being oppressed, only to be

oppressed and behind bars. The subject of slavery is something that this film explains, and how

although it does not go by that name currently, the rate of which African Americans are being

sent to prison is of the same origins. Society has continued an uproar that must be stopped in

order to preserve the justice we have left, and to build a better justice system.