A New Film Explores Ties Between Slavery and Mass Incarceration

The visionary filmmaker Ava DuVernay, director of 2014’s Selma, makes it clear in her long-awaited documentary, 13th, that the U.S. prison system is the nation’s greatest shame since slavery. More than that, she posits that it is actually a continuation of slavery. The systemic denial of freedom to African Americans is tied up in both institutions, and DuVernay new work makes those connections undeniable. In fact, her film argues convincingly that the country’s current incarceration state might be worse than slavery. Consider, as 13th informs us, that there are more African Americans ensnared in the criminal justice system today than the number enslaved in 1850.

Slavery would have been abolished in 1865 by the 13th Amendment (hence the film’s title), but for one small clause that all but grandfathered slavery back in for the sake of crime and punishment. That clause reads that slavery shall no longer exist in the U.S. “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.“ America has been unshy about exploiting that clause to great profit ever since, and 13th duly chides the nation for it.