Project 39A recommends Ava DuVernay’s documentary titled, ‘13th’ and Michelle Alexander’s book titled, ‘The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness’.
What does it mean to support or ignore a criminal justice system that is violent and discriminatory at its very core? As a part of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement and in response to widespread violence against African-Americans, civil rights groups and the public in the United States have begun considering radical solutions such as defunding the police and abolishing prisons. While these suggestions have divided supporters of the movement, been mischaracterized and ridiculed; the proposals in fact are built on historical and sociological analysis of the American criminal justice system and its impact.
In light of the lack of understanding of these radical movements, Project 39A recommends the documentary ‘13th’ and the book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander as introductions to the history and context of such proposals. While the analysis in both the film and the book may appear specific to the context of the United States, it offers lessons in understanding the history and impact of the criminal justice system as an institution. Reflections from these works can help us look beyond individual issues with the police or with sentencing into critiquing the criminal justice system as a whole.
13th
13th is a documentary directed by Ava DuVernay and released in 2016. It presents a reckoning of the racist nature and history of America’s criminal justice system based on the experiences and research of various racial justice scholars and activists. 13th offers a compelling account that challenges the conventional wisdom that the system disproportionately harms African-Africans, arguing instead that the system in its very design and imagination was created to target and oppress African-Americans.
The title of the documentary is based on the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution that abolished slavery, arguing that the prison system in the United States is a continuation of historical slavery. The documentary highlights the insidious portrayal of African-Americans as “beasts”, constantly linked with criminality, as a tool to authorise violence by the state through a brutal system of mass incarceration. The documentary reveals the mass incarceration of African-Americans, disproportionate police surveillance of marginalised communities, subjecting African-Americans to harsh police violence as well as wrongful conviction of African-Americans through a flawed trial process that incentivises plea bargaining. Convictions under this flawed and discriminatory process prevent those affected from accessing a number of civil and constitutional rights – including the right to vote, access housing and employment. In this way, the prison system reproduces the conditions of social existence of enslaved people by similarly disqualifying declared criminals from exercising their basic rights.
The shocking scale and impact of mass incarceration on African-Americans renders doubtful any claim that it is the result of a sincere, but overzealous, law enforcement agency committed to public safety. 13th unravels the political and racial history of mass incarceration in the United States, arguing that the phenomenon is a response to the civil rights movement that dismantled racist policies that disadvantaged African-Americans in the United States. The film is a powerful commentary on the state’s use of political institutions and harsher laws to exercise power, assert control and instil a sense of fear against marginalised communities. In particular, the film highlights the manner in which the ‘war on drugs’ and the ‘prison-industrial complex’ were used to continue the effect of such discriminatory legislation, in impact if not in name. The film notes how terms such as ‘law and order’, popularised in the media with concerted political effort, began to simply mean the targeting of African-Americans. DuVernay argues that the system has successfully created a ‘criminal’ class, one which overwhelmingly comprises African-American, and reproduces the very conditions that the 13th Amendment sought to abolish and denies their basic human dignity through systematic oppression.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colourblindness
One of the interviewees in DuVernay’s film was Michelle Alexander, who wrote on racist nature of the institution of America’s criminal justice system in The New Jim Crow. Alexander’s book focused on the political history of the modern criminal justice system, with particular emphasis on the ‘war on drugs’, to draw parallels between the lived experiences of African-Americans under slavery, ‘Jim Crow’ laws and modern day mass incarceration. ‘Jim Crow’ laws were introduced in Southern states, after the abolition of slavery, to segregate African Americans in public places and, particularly, in education in order to hinder economic and political progress by African-Americans.
Alexander explains how the ‘war on drugs’, which began under the Reagan administration in 1982, was a concerted effort between the government and industrialists to criminalise African-American communities and to use the language of ‘law and order’ to justify their oppressive tactics. Alexander argues that in response to the capitulations after the civil rights movement, the system began using sanitised language of ‘law and order’, as opposed to explicitly racist terminology. She further argues that using seemingly neutral language has far reaching, insidious effects, preventing civil liberties scholars and advocates themselves from recognising the criminal justice system as a regime designed to relegate African-Americans to a second class status.
Alexander highlights the need to differentiate the modern American criminal justice system from other social systems, such as employment, where racist biases are seeped into an otherwise workable institution. Instead, Alexander calls for characterising the criminal justice system as an institution whose primary purpose is oppression of African-Americans in society. To make this point, she explores the similarities in the oppressive experiences across multiple generations of one African-American family who all experienced the same absence of liberties and constitutional rights under various regimes, that is, slavery, Jim Crow and mass incarceration.
Conclusion
Although 13th and The New Jim Crow appear to be specific to issues in the United States, the debates documented in both works offer a lens to examine the criminal justice system as an institution through the holistic study of its history, politics and impact. This approach is relevant to the examination of any country’s criminal justice system. In particular, it is worth examining the Indian criminal justice system under a similar lens, considering the roots of the institution in the previous colonial regime and its disproportionate impact on Dalits, Bahujans, Adivasis and other marginalised groups. Both 13th and The New Jim Crow raise larger philosophical and sociological questions on the purpose of the criminal justice system, which we must consider as it applies to our own system.
Additional recommendations:
- ‘The House I Live In’ (An Independent Lens film on PBS, 2013).
- ‘Philly D.A.’ (An Independent Lens Original Series on PBS, 2021).
- Angela Davis, ‘Are Prisons Obsolete’ (Seven Stories Press, 2003).
- Ruth Wilson Gilmore, ‘Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California’ (University of California Press, 2007).
- Michel Foucault, ‘Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison’ (Gallimard, 1995).
