13th, By Ava Duvernay

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13th is an American documentary by director Ava DuVernay. Centered on race in the United States criminal justice system. The documentary is titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which outlawed slavery. The documentary begins with a quote from the President Barack Obama, “The United States is home to 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s prisoners”. This statistic stated by Obama sets the tone for what's ahead; a very overwhelming and straightforward look on the United States today. The cold hard truth that slavery is not really over.
In 1972, the United States had a prison population of 300,000. Today, we have a prison population of 2.3 million. Resulting, in the United States, having the highest rate of incarceration in the world. After the abolishment of slavery in 1865, the southern economy suffered greatly, since African Americans were its main force of labor in its economic production system. To regain their …show more content…
It was easy for politicians to say that the civil rights movement itself was contributing to rising crime rates. Presidents like Nixon and Reagan brought on a war on drugs. Hundreds and thousand of people were being sent to jail. President Bush spent millions of dollars to build large high security prisons and passed many laws that seemed to target people of color.
13th by Ava DuVernay, also went over police brutality and the many cases were unarmed African Americans were killed. For example it went over the case of Trayvon Martin. A seventeen year old unarmed African American boy who was followed and shot by an armed white man. The man who shot him, George Zimmerman was sentenced as not guilty due to the stand your ground law issued in Florida. That gives a person the right to protect themselves if they feel threatened. Even in Zimmerman was following Martin and he was the one carrying a
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