Ava DuVernay directed the award-winning feature film about Martin Luther King, SELMA, and she returns to our screens with this documentary, backed by Netflix, about the way in which the US criminal justice system is oppressing black men. Her documentary's central thesis is that when slavery was made illegal with the passing of the 13th amendment to the US constitution, a crucial clause within that amendment made an invidious exception - one could still be enslaved if a convicted criminal. The thesis is that this exception has been exploited by the establishment to keep the black man subjugated, and that every superficial step forward in the civil rights struggle has been accompanied by a concomitant but increasingly subtle repressive force. So, when the 13th amendment freed the Southern states' workforce, the police started arresting black men for trivial crimes in order to take advantage of their labour. And in order to justify the incarceration, the establishment had to create the myth of the animalistic, savage Black man - a danger to decent white folk, and particularly their women. It is this image that was so brilliantly and hatefully propagated in D.W. Griffiths' THE BIRTH OF A NATION - a film that revived the Ku Klux Klan. But it's after the repeal of Jim Crow that the rates of incarceration really jump - and this documentary argues that this is a direct consequence of Nixon's Southern Strategy to win the votes of now alienated white working class Southern voters by recasting appeals to their racism as a platform of law and order. In other words, rather than going after the black man directly, go after criminals, knowing that those groups can be depicted as one and the same thing. in a final twist, the documentary argues that big business is now in on the act - that mass incarceration has created a new market for private companies to make profits, but only if they receive a steady stream of inmates. The result is a corporate backed lobby group proposing legislation that ensures rising incarceration rates and disproportionately impacts young black men. Worst of all, most will never see a trial because they will opt for a plea deal rather than risk mandatory minimum sentences.
