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Social Injustice In The 13th

837 Words4 Pages

Angelina Rodriguez
Gianunzio
Eng 50
4 April 2017

The 13th
One out of four African American males will serve prison time at least once in their life.In 2003 African-American men were reportedly twelve times more likely to receive prison time in drug related offenses than white men even though surveys have shown white and black people in the U.S sell and use drugs at the same rate. A film that explores this concept is Ava Duvernay’s “The 13th” which argues that not only is there a social injustice in our prison system but also loopholes in our very own Constitution of The Unites States..While some might support the police brutality against minority communities and the private prisons ran by republicans, Ava Duvernay sheds light on how modern …show more content…

Four million people who were former property and formerly the integral of the economic production system in the south were now free under the thirteenth amendment that stated- slavery, except as punishment for a crime, shall not exist in the United States. Immediately following the abolition of slavery, the loophole in the constitution stating slavery was legal if convicted of a crime was immediately exploited in hopes to rebuild the economy. African Americans were then arrested in mass for extremely minor crimes like loitering, making it the nation's first prison boom. The ideology that blacks are criminals that is used in today's thought process was stemmed by the high criminal rate from this mass incarceration. Now having large populations of African Americans in Los Angeles, Oakland, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit etc, very few people don't realize that they did not go there as immigrants from the south but rather refugees from …show more content…

The War on Drugs was announced under President Nixon's term where he declared America's number one enemy to be drug abuse. Although Nixon claims the enemy was drug abuse, in a talk with a reporter from Harpers Magazine(1994) a Nixon Administration official admitted The War on Drugs was to throw blacks into jail “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." (John Ehrlichman) President Nixon was the first to coin the term War on Drugs but the one to enforce the rhetorical war and make it into a literal war was President Ronald Reagan in his presidential term from

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