Reflections on the “13th”

The 13th Amendment abolished slavery and was passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified on December 6, 1865. One sentence with a complicated legacy: "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." 

This week in my African American Experience Class we studied Mass Incarceration and the Prison Industrial Complex. We watched Ana Duvernay's documentary 13th which can be viewed on Netflix & YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfcq5pF8u8 and read the Introduction in Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. I highly recommend that you read the Preface in the 10th Anniversary Edition of the The New Jim Crow which was reissued in 2020. 

The last time I took a college course was in 1982. We are required to post a summary of our thoughts after we finish our assignments and also have to comment on at least two of our classmates summations. I'm sharing my reflections on the assigned material. 

13th

Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th is a great complement to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. I was in elementary school during the Civil Rights period and vividly remember Richard Nixon’s election and Presidency in 1968. Nixon’s Presidency would be the start of the New Jim Crow era that Barry Goldwater planted the seeds for in his campaign for the Presidency in 1964 against Lyndon Johnson. Nobody in 1968 would have ever predicted that the United States would be the world’s king of mass incarceration, housing 20% of the world’s prison population while having 5% of the world’s population. Nobody would have predicted that we would one day have more Blacks incarcerated in Prison in the 21st century than we had slaves in the 1800’s.  How in the hell can a society that was supposedly founded on Judeo-Christian principles that views itself as exceptional and a leader in world affairs justify the incarceration of this many individuals? We can’t and that’s what this documentary is really about: witnessing the great United States of America as a "failed social experiment."

Watching this documentary and reading some of Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” got me fired up and helped crystalize a lot of thoughts for me on what I’ve witnessed go down in our country in my lifetime in terms of militarizing police agencies throughout the USA, reducing funding of key social services, and hyperbolic criminalization and incarceration, primarily of Black and brown brothers and sisters and the poor.

I created two videos for my social media platforms after watching the 13th.

 Video 1: Voter Suppression is real & it has deep roots - Supreme Court & Federal Circuit Courts of Appeal making rulings that you can't count ballots that arrive after November 3rd even if they are postmarked on that date. A stone cold gansta move! Sharing this 1980 clip from "13th" where Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of ALEC, expressly states that his objective is to limit voting rights.

America is a country that was founded on a lie. Founders didn’t believe everyone was entitled to vote. Shameful that common sense doesn’t rule in enabling every vote to count. Voter suppression is real. Need amended Voter Rights Act. Adapt to the times.

“VOTER SUPPRESSION - American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC):”

 (Links to an external site.I took a sociology class in 1974 and vividly remember discussing the state of prisons at the time. One of our central themes was whether the prison system was doing a good  job of rehabilitating individuals while they were serving their sentences.  Providing an environment that truly offers rehabilitation and a second chance at a productive life has always been a challenge in the US Federal and State Penitentiary systems. It hasn’t gotten better; It’s gotten worse; and there are a myriad of reasons why. To name a few, exponential growth in prison population; privatization of the industry, federal and state laws that restrict the rights of prisoners in terms of eligibility for parole and when they are released into mainstream society.I could write for days on this issue but I’ll end on this note. We, as a society, have failed a huge segment of our society by not holding our elected leaders accountable for their misplaced priorities in demonizing Black males and allowing modern day slavery to still occur in mass because of panning to voters to get elected, introducing faulty and punitive legislation, and allowing publicly held corporations to earn huge profits off the backs of prisoners caught up in the Mass Incarceration Movement and Prison Industrial Complex. Stop the madnesIt’s amazing to delve into Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” ten years after it was published. America had a completely different vibe in 2010 than in 2020 with the election of Barack Obama in 2008 as the United States’ first Black President and Democrats having control of both houses of Congress. Optimism was rampant that Obama’s election signaled a turn to a new post-racial America; and that a book titled “The New Jim Crow” might have historical relevancy but wouldn’t be a road map to effect change in our criminal justice system. That type of viewpoint would prove to be a miscalculation and Alexander addressed how Obama’s election shouldn’t be viewed as a salve in ignoring the racial caste system that has evolved in America since the passage of the Civil & Voting Rights Acts in the mid-60’sWhat is “The New Jim Crow?” America’s war on drugs, which resulted in stringent and punitive legislation for drug related crimes and stratospheric funding at the federal level to law enforcement and to prison/correctional institutions. Alexander’s focus in the book is solely on the experience of African American men; how they have been disproportionately targeted by governmental policies and Presidential dictates to create a new racialized caste system to replace the caste systems that existed during slavery and the Jim Crow era of American historyideo 2: The Good Old Days According to The Law & Order Candidate - Dedicated to all Republicans who hold their noses when voting for Donald J. Trump.

Video 2: The Good Old Days According to The Law & Order Candidate - Dedicated to all Republicans who hold their noses when voting for Donald J. Trump.

I took a sociology class in 1978 and vividly remember discussing the state of prisons at the time. One of our central themes was whether the prison system was doing a good  job of rehabilitating individuals while they were serving their sentences.  Providing an environment that truly offers rehabilitation and a second chance at a productive life has always been a challenge in the US Federal and State Penitentiary systems. It hasn’t gotten better; It’s gotten worse; and there are a myriad of reasons why. To name a few, exponential growth in prison population; privatization of the industry, federal and state laws that restrict the rights of prisoners in terms of eligibility for parole and when they are released into mainstream society.

I could write for days on this issue but I’ll end on this note. We, as a society, have failed a huge segment of our society by not holding our elected leaders accountable for their misplaced priorities in demonizing Black males and allowing modern day slavery to still occur in mass because of panning to voters to get elected, introducing faulty and punitive legislation, and allowing publicly held corporations to earn huge profits off the backs of prisoners caught up in the Mass Incarceration Movement and Prison Industrial Complex. Stop the madness!

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

What’s a caste? A “stigmatized racial group locked into an inferior position by law and custom.” Caste is not a word I normally associate with American society, but Alexander’s logic and research strongly support her thesis that America had “birthed another caste system, a system of mass incarceration, that caged millions of poor people and people of color and relegated millions more to a permanent second-class status.”

Alexander’s indictment that past Presidents since 1968 from both parties are responsible for the current state of affairs in America’s prison industrial complex might be an eye opener to some, but one shouldn’t be surprised that Bill Clinton had something in common in the criminal justice arena with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Running on a “Law and Order” platform has been en vogue since Barry Goldwater planted the seeds in his 1964 Southern Strategy campaign against Lyndon Johnson.

Only in this 2020 election cycle are people finally internalizing that our country’s mass incarceration problem is not a criminal justice issue but is a racial justice or civil rights issue. I love how Alexander points out that mass incarcerations have been ignored for decades by civil rights leaders and Black congressional representatives because their primary focus was tied to stopping the assault on affirmative action policies by Republican legislators and judicial rulings from Circuit/Supreme Courts. 

Bryan Stevenson has often said that “slavery didn’t end; it’s evolved.” The 13th amendment was ratified in 1865 and it abolished slavery with one exception; “slavery remained appropriate as punishment for a crime.” The punishment clause in the 13th amendment has led to many abuses since Reconstruction and Alexander does a wonderful job of detailing how mass incarceration in the 21st century leads to those convicted of felony crimes being denied rights similar to the rights that were denied Blacks during the days of Jim Crow. Americans are finally waking up to this reality, as evidenced by Proposition 17 being a ballot initiative in California in the 2020 election. Passage of Proposition 17, a state measure that asks voters “to restore voting rights upon completion of prison term to persons who have been disqualified while serving a prison term,” would ensure that people convicted of crimes need not be sentenced to a second class citizenship for the rest of their lives.  

Alexander made the case in 2010 that the New Jim Crow couldn’t be be dismantled through traditional litigation and policy-reform strategies; that it needed a major social movement to reverse the institutional, structural and systemic bias/racism that had accumulated over 55+ years in developing this racialized system of control. We’re now in the midst of the most radical social movement in the USA since the mid 60s; and that movement, as well as the Covid-19 Pandemic, has sounded the alarm that we must root out the cancerous policies that have created America's monstrous prison industrial complex.