On Monday, March 6 at 4 p.m., the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies in conjunction with the University of Massachusetts Boston Women’s Center had a screening of Ava DuVernay’s “13th.” Duvernay is also the director of “Selma.” As a part of the Women Take the Reel Festival, “13th” was sponsored by the Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies (GCWS) in honor of International Women’s Day.
The film is also a part of the spring 2017 series “Not My Normal: Resisting Systematic Oppressions.” The film takes an in-depth look at the prison and criminal justice systems in the United States and how they continue to contribute to the nation’s history of racial inequality. The film came out in October 2016 on Netflix. The screening was followed by a panel discussion featuring Professors Tahirah Abdullah from the psychology department and Andrea Leverentz from the sociology department here at UMass Boston.
The title “13th” is a reference to the Thirteenth Amendment of the US Constitution. The Thirteenth Amendment declared, “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.”
The Thirteenth Amendment is known to have abolished slavery in the US; however, the film looked at how a loophole in the amendment led to mass incarceration in the country, particularly among African Americans, while also analyzing mass incarceration as the new Jim Crow.
For a country that has five percent of the world’s population, the US records the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The US alone has 25 percent of the world’s prison population. According to a report obtained from prisonpolicy.org, “The American criminal justice system holds more than 2.3 million people in 1,719 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 the U.S. territories.”
Of the 2.3 million people who are incarcerated, this number does not show the full picture; it does not include those who are monitored by the criminal justice system. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that a total of 6,741,400 persons were supervised by US adult correctional systems in the year 2015. To help better comprehend where these numbers came from, the likelihood of lifetime imprisonment for white men is 1 in 17 and 1 in 3 for black men. Black men make up about 40.2 percent of the prison population.
Among the rates of imprisonment, the film looked at how the labeling of individuals leads to the self-fulfilling prophecy. Terms such as the “super predator” were used to describe black men, who were also labeled as animals and beasts who could not be controlled. The film also looked at how leaders such as past presidents used the visceral image of criminality for their own advantage by instilling the fear of the black man.
The film looked in-depth at the entire criminal justice system. From the shootings of unarmed black men by predominantly white police officers, the Stand Your Ground law in Florida that allowed Trayvon Martin’s killer to walk free, prison privatization, the “crimmigration system,” the 1994 Crime Bill, prison businesses and the prison industrial complex, war on drugs and the tough on crime initiatives.
“13th” is available on Netflix for streaming. The film is more than just a documentary. For many, it is their reality. The New York Times Critics Pick referred to it as “the Journey from Shackles to Prison Bars.”