The list feels endless and includes lynching, Jim Crow, Nixon’s presidential campaign, Reagan’s War on Drugs, Bill Clinton’s Three Strikes and mandatory sentencing laws and the current cash-for-prisoners model that generates millions for private bail and incarceration firms. So begins a cycle that DuVernay examines in each of its evolving iterations when one method of subservience-based terror falls out of favor, another takes its place. The duly convicted part may have been questionable, but by no means did it need to be justifiably proven. In the first iteration of a “Southern strategy,” hundreds of newly emancipated slaves were re-enlisted into free, legal servitude courtesy of minor or trumped-up charges. “Except as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted” reads the loophole in the law. Their primary source of income, slaves, were no longer obligated to line Southerners’ pockets with their blood, sweat and tears. We’re told that, after the Civil War, the economy of the former Confederate States of America was decimated.
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Each interviewee is shot in a location that evokes an industrial setting, which visually supports the theme of prison as a factory churning out the free labor that the 13th Amendment supposedly dismantled when it abolished slavery. DuVernay not only interviews liberal scholars and activists for the cause like Angela Davis, Henry Louis Gates and Van Jones, she also devotes screen time to conservatives such as Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist. Our journey begins from there, with a slew of familiar and occasionally surprising talking heads filling the frame and providing information. “13th” begins with an alarming statistic: One out of four African-American males will serve prison time at one point or another in their lives. The film builds its case piece by shattering piece, inspiring levels of shock and outrage that stun the viewer, leaving one shaken and disturbed before closing out on a visual note of hope designed to keep us on the hook as advocates for change. Her analysis could not be more timely nor more infuriating. Director Ava DuVernay’s takes an unflinching, well-informed and thoroughly researched look at the American system of incarceration, specifically how the prison industrial complex affects people of color.
That clause, which converts slavery from a legal business model to an equally legal method of punishment for criminals, is the subject of the Netflix documentary “13th.” Premiering tonight at the New York Film Festival, “13th” is the first documentary to open the festival in its 54 year history. When the 13 th amendment was ratified in 1865, its drafters left themselves a large, very exploitable loophole in the guise of an easily missed clause in its definition.
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