The 13th Movie Analysis

The 13th is a documentary by Ava DuVernay, who provides a realistic representation of our current criminal justice system and the people in it. The documentary follows the chronological progression of events that lead to our current criminal justice system, starting from the beginning of the twentieth century and ending in modern times. Representatives from both sides of the issues presented were brought forth and their stories were told, even Newt Gingrich had progressive things to say about the reform needed in the criminal justice system. The point of the documentary was to educate people on the major issues involved in the current criminal justice system from the war on drugs to mandatory minimums. One of the most stunning things illustrated …show more content…
This company was feature in the documentary, CCA is an over 1.7 billion dollars a year industry, people are going to try to get more people incarcerated. The more citizens incarcerated the more money the federal and state governments must pay to keep the facilities active. Therefore, CCA has incentives to get a larger number of inmates. The easiest people in incarcerate are lower class citizens because they do not have the money to afford lawyers and are forced to use public defendants. Public defendants are hilariously overworked many of which have more than 1,700 cases a year, that’s over 4 cases a day. Most of those courses result in a plea bargain that generally favors the prosecution. Often people who are have a low socioeconomic status are not correctly educated on their rights when in the court system. The current criminal justice system would never have enough time to put every accused person on trial, which is why many defendants and prosecutors try to force a plea deal. The overworked criminal justice system is only one reason for the overcrowding of the prison system. Many of the people who are lower on the socioeconomic ladder are ethnically non-white, this leads to the over-representation of minorities in the prison …show more content…
In which I noted some interesting things, one interesting thing was that even though the number of stop and frisks went up the accuracy of the stop and frisks didn’t go down. Meaning that even though generally only 10% of people were arrested for a crime 90% were always innocent, this could be interpreted as the policy working because they could arrest more people. Then it became apparent to me that the many police precincts operated on quotas, basically every cop must stop and frisk a certain number of people or else their professional career is