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October 2016 marked the release of Ava DuVernay’s documentary, 13th: the most prominent film to date to tackle the history of mass incarceration in the U.S. DuVernay tells her story through the lens of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude,
“except as a punishment for crime whereof the part shall have been duly convicted.”
The case for change is made by an unusual array of commentators, who span the political spectrum. Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist appear on equal footing with such scholar-activists as Angela Davis, Marie Gottschalk, and Khalil Muhammad, whose work profoundly helps to shape our understanding of racialized law enforcement, police and prison violence, mass incarceration, and the growth of the public-private prison industrial complex.
About 60 percent of those incarcerated are people of color, mostly Black, Latino, and Indigenous. The rate of growth for the incarceration of women, particularly Black women, has outpaced that of men. At the intersections of race and class, LGBTQ and gender non-conforming people, and people with disabilities and mental illness are heavily policed and incarcerated.
Over the last decade, bipartisan solutions to reforming the criminal justice system in the U.S. began to gain popular traction, as high-profile incidents of police violence drew public attention to systemic problems with law enforcement violence.
We can start by changing the way we think about, discuss, and depict the devastation of the prison industrial complex.