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"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,  except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted , shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." –Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution

When the 13 th  amendment was ratified in 1865, its drafters left themselves a large, very exploitable loophole in the guise of an easily missed clause in its definition. That clause, which converts slavery from a legal business model to an equally legal method of punishment for criminals, is the subject of the Netflix documentary “13th.” Premiering tonight at the New York Film Festival, “13th” is the first documentary to open the festival in its 54 year history. Director Ava DuVernay ’s takes an unflinching, well-informed and thoroughly researched look at the American system of incarceration, specifically how the prison industrial complex affects people of color. Her analysis could not be more timely nor more infuriating. The film builds its case piece by shattering piece, inspiring levels of shock and outrage that stun the viewer, leaving one shaken and disturbed before closing out on a visual note of hope designed to keep us on the hook as advocates for change.

“13th” begins with an alarming statistic: One out of four African-American males will serve prison time at one point or another in their lives. Our journey begins from there, with a slew of familiar and occasionally surprising talking heads filling the frame and providing information. DuVernay not only interviews liberal scholars and activists for the cause like Angela Davis , Henry Louis Gates and Van Jones, she also devotes screen time to conservatives such as Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist. Each interviewee is shot in a location that evokes an industrial setting, which visually supports the theme of prison as a factory churning out the free labor that the 13th Amendment supposedly dismantled when it abolished slavery.

We’re told that, after the Civil War, the economy of the former Confederate States of America was decimated. Their primary source of income, slaves, were no longer obligated to line Southerners’ pockets with their blood, sweat and tears. Unless, of course, they were criminals. “Except as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted” reads the loophole in the law. In the first iteration of a “Southern strategy,” hundreds of newly emancipated slaves were re-enlisted into free, legal servitude courtesy of minor or trumped-up charges. The duly convicted part may have been questionable, but by no means did it need to be justifiably proven.

So begins a cycle that DuVernay examines in each of its evolving iterations; when one method of subservience-based terror falls out of favor, another takes its place. The list feels endless and includes lynching, Jim Crow, Nixon’s presidential campaign, Reagan’s War on Drugs, Bill Clinton ’s Three Strikes and mandatory sentencing laws and the current cash-for-prisoners model that generates millions for private bail and incarceration firms.

That last item is a major point of discussion in “13th”, with an onscreen graphic keeping tally of the number of prisoners in the system as the years pass. Starting in the 1940’s, the curve of the prisoner count graph begins rising slowly though steeply. A meteoric rise began during the Civil Rights movement and continued into the current day. As this statistic rises, so does the level of decimation of families of color. The stronger the protest for rights, the harder the system fights back against it with means of incarceration. Profit becomes the major by-product of this cycle, with an organization called ALEC providing a scary, sinister influence on building laws that make its corporate members richer.

Several times throughout “13th” there is a shock cut to the word CRIMINAL, which stands alone against a black background and is centered on the huge movie screen. It serves as a reminder that far too often, people of color are seen as simply that, regardless of who they are. Starting with D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”, DuVernay traces the myth of the scary Black felon with supernatural levels of strength and deviant sexual potency, a myth designed to terrify the majority into believing that only White people were truly human and deserving of proper treatment. This dehumanization allowed for the acceptance of laws and ideas that had more than a hint of bias. We see higher sentences given for crack vs. cocaine possession and plea bargains accepted by innocent people too terrified to go to trial. We also learn that a troubling percentage of people remain in jail because they’re too poor to post their own bail. And regardless of your color, if you’re a felon, you can no longer vote to change the laws that may have unfairly prosecuted you. You lose a primary right all Americans have.

“13th” covers a lot of ground as it works its way to the current days of Black Lives Matter and the terrifying videos of the endless list of African-Americans being shot by police or folks who supposedly “stood their ground.” On her journey to this point, DuVernay doesn’t let either political party off the hook, nor does she ignore the fact that many people of color bought into the “law and order” philosophies that led to the current situation. We see Hillary Clinton talking about “super-predators” and Donald Trump ’s full-page ad advocating the death penalty for the Central Park Five (who, as a reminder, were all innocent). We also see people like African-American congressman Charlie Rangel, who originally was on board with the tough on crime laws President Clinton signed into law.

By the time we get to the montage of the deaths of Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner and others (not to mention the huge, screen-covering graphic of names of African-Americans shot by law enforcement), “13th” has already proven its thesis on how such events can not only occur, but can also seem sadly like “business as usual.” It’s a devastating finale to the film, one that follows an onscreen discussion about whether or not the destruction of Black bodies should be run ad nauseum on cable news programs. DuVernay opts to show the footage, with an onscreen disclaimer that it’s being shown with permission by the families of the victims, something she did not need to seek but did so out of respect.

Between the lines, “13th” boldly asks the question if African-Americans were actually ever truly “free” in this country. We are freer, as this generation has it a lot easier than our ancestors who were enslaved, but the question of being as completely “free” as our White compatriots hangs in the air. If not, will the day come when all things will be equal? The final takeaway of “13th” is that change must come not from politicians, but from the hearts and minds of the American people.

Despite the heavy subject matter, DuVernay ends the film with joyful scenes of children and adults of color enjoying themselves in a variety of activities. It reminds us, as she said in her Q&A with NYFF director Kent Jones , that “Black trauma is not our entire lives. There is also Black joy.” That inspiring message, and all the important, educational information provided by this excellent documentary, make “13th” a must-see.

"13th" is currently streaming on Netflix.

Odie Henderson

Odie "Odienator" Henderson has spent over 33 years working in Information Technology. He runs the blogs Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire  here .

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13th (2016)

100 minutes

• Ava DuVernay

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Review: Ava DuVernay’s documentary ‘13th’ simmers with anger and burns with eloquence

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It’s President Obama’s voice we hear first. “So let’s look at the statistics,” he says. “The United States is home to 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s prisoners. Think about that.”

Which is what “13th,” Ava DuVernay’s smart, powerful and disturbing documentary, proceeds to make us do.

As persuasively argued as it is angry, and it is very angry, “13th” follows that statistic with another, equally unsettling one. African Americans make up 6.5% of the American population but 40.2% of the prison populace. While a white male has a 1 in 17 chance of ending up behind bars, for black males it is 1 in 3.

How did this situation happen, where did it come from? How did America end up with the highest rate of incarceration in the world? How did our prison population go from 196,441 in 1970 to nearly 2.3 million today?

Named after the constitutional amendment that ended slavery, DuVernay’s follow up to best picture Oscar nominee “Selma” reminds us that this state of affairs did not take place overnight.

Offering a brisk, cogently argued alternative to the conventionally taught American story, allied in that sense to Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” DuVernay gives us a documentary that systematically covers a lot of territory, a century and a half of race relations in this country in fact.

If it is packed with facts, statistics and on-camera thoughts — from top-drawer academics like Henry Louis Gates, Michelle Alexander (author of the groundbreaking “The New Jim Crow”) and Angela Davis as well as assorted notables including Sen. Cory Booker, Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist — it is because there is so much to deal with.

In addition to these incisive talking heads, “13th” provides a great deal of newsreel and documentary material (footage of a white Little Rock mob beating up black journalist L. Alex Wilson, later the editor of the Chicago Defender, is especially chilling).

And music plays a key role as well, not only with songs like Nina Simone’s version of “Work Song” heard on the sound track, but with key words from rap lyrics like Public Enemy’s “Don’t Believe the Hype” appearing as arresting large type on the screen.

As put together by DuVernay’s longtime editor, Spencer Averick (who also shares co-writing credit with the director), everything in “13th” illuminates what is convincingly presented as a sad and tragic story that we are still living today.

The film’s premise is that while the 13th Amendment to the Constitution eliminated slavery and involuntary servitude, it in effect had an unintentional loophole that asserted “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

For the South after the end of the Civil War, says University of Connecticut professor Jelani Cobb, the question became how to replace the 4 million slaves who were the critical component of the region’s economic system.

The answer turned out to be mass arrests for minor crimes such as loitering and vagrancy and the creation of a system of convict leasing that allowed prisoners to work for private parties.

At the same time, what one academic calls “the mythology of black criminality” was created, with D.W. Griffith’s 1915 “The Birth of a Nation,” with its racist images of rapacious, animalistic behavior, being a key element, leading to a major revival of the Ku Klux Klan and an increase in lynchings.

Jim Crow segregation, with African Americans relegated to second-class citizenship, came next, leading eventually to Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement that, Gates notes, sought to turn the prison system on its head by portraying going to jail for a cause as a noble action.

While the 1965 Civil Rights Act was passed to remedy that situation, “13th” underscores that an increase in crime and the Republican Southern Strategy, formulated under President Nixon, of having crime stand in for race in order to help turn the South from Democratic to Republican, pushed the other way.

The war on drugs promulgated by Republicans and Democrats alike extended this dynamic, with Gingrich commenting on the unfairness of criminalizing crack cocaine, prevalent in black neighborhoods, over the powder variety and President Clinton shown apologizing for his role in the 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill that led to massive prison expansion.

“13th” covers so much territory that many of the events it incorporates, like the suicide of former Rykers Island inmate Khalief Browder and the police shooting of Black Panther Fred Hampton, can only be mentioned briefly.

Shown in considerable detail, however, is the work of ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), an organization that writes laws that benefit the major corporations that are its members. “There are people out there desperately trying to make sure the prison population does not drop by one person,” says Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, “because their economic model needs that.”

Though DuVernay has been working on this film for years, its footage of violence at Donald Trump rallies, linked to the candidate’s publicly expressed yearning for “the good old days,” brings its story chillingly up to date.

What “black lives matter” means in essence, one of this film’s voices says, “is that all lives matter,” a point “13th” makes with undeniable eloquence as well as persuasive force.

No MPAA rating.

Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

Playing Laemmle’s Monica, Santa Monica. Streaming on Netflix.

Critic’s Choice. “13th.” Offering a brisk, cogently argued alternative to conventionally taught American history, Ava DuVernay’s powerful, persuasive documentary systematically covers a century and a half of race relations in this country. — Kenneth Turan

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New York Film Festival Review: ‘13TH’

Ava DuVernay's documentary on the era of mass incarceration opens the New York Film Festival on a note of spectacular truth.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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Ava DuVernay ’s “ 13TH ” is the first documentary ever to be selected as the opening-night film of The New York Film Festival. (It premieres at Lincoln Center on Sept. 30.) That lends a momentous aura to what is already, each year, a momentous event. In this case, the precedent feels spiritually right. Movies, as both a business and an entertainment form, are struggling to define themselves in the 21st century, but there’s no doubt that we’re in the high renaissance era of documentary. Each week, every day, in theaters and on VOD, on cable channels and networks and streaming services, you can see movies that dive into topical issues with the investigative fury we once expected from newspapers. You can see movies that conjure (as maybe only movies can) the ghosts and artifacts and living semiotics of history, and that hold you in their grip with a force and excitement that match that of any dramatic feature. “13TH” is a movie that does all those things at once. More than just another documentary, it’s a crucial and stirring document — of racism and injustice, of politics and the big-picture design of America — that, I think, will be watched and referenced for years to come.

DuVernay, the brilliant director of “Selma,” has made a film that possesses a piercing relevance in the age of Black Lives Matter and the unspeakable horror and tragedy of escalated police shootings. “13TH” looks at the current American state of “mass incarceration,” a phrase that has quickly grown numbing with repetition; DuVernay puts the (disturbing) feeling back into it. She takes off from an era in which our nation — as President Obama observes in the film’s opening moments — contains just 5% of the world’s population and 25% of its prisoners. DuVernay’s chronicle of this crisis is heartrending and enraging; if that’s all the movie did, it would be invaluable. Yet “13TH” also travels deep into history, connecting every link in the chain to reveal how we got here. The metaphor is intentional: DuVernay’s message is that the psychodynamics of slavery, and the economic logistics of it, have never gone away. Instead, they went underground, mutating into different forms (Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the “war on drugs”) as the decades rolled on.

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That’s a bold thesis, one you might imagine will put certain audiences on the defensive. DuVernay, though, works with a slow, sure hand that never risks oversimplifying the past. On the contrary, she brings the psychological history of what has gone on in this country to life in a way that few mainstream investigations or (God help us) liberal message movies have done. When you watch “13TH,” you feel that you’re seeing an essential dimension of America with new vision. That’s what a cathartically clear-eyed work of documentary art can do.

DuVernay, of course, is far from the first social critic to observe that slavery, for all practical purposes, didn’t end in 1865. Yet she examines its legacy with freshly devastating insight. In recent years, “The Birth of a Nation,” the 1915 D.W. Griffith landmark that essentially invented feature filmmaking as we know it, has been treated as such a racist pariah of a movie that its very existence has, to a degree, been shunned. The film’s racism (more than racism; let’s call it what it was — an exhortation to terrorism and racist violence) is undeniable, a stain on our country and the DNA of its popular culture. Yet Griffith’s power as a filmmaker is relevant as well, and DuVernay explores the movie in all its contradictions. The African-American Studies scholar Jelani Cobb unpacks “The Birth of a Nation” with blistering eloquence, describing how Griffith, in his portrayal of the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan, invented the image of the burning cross, and how the film offered “a tremendously accurate prediction of how race would operate in the United States.” Yet where does the escalation of that oppression turn into the rise of prison culture?

“13TH” traces the connection back to the end of the Civil War, and — in a grand horrific irony — to the passage of the 13th Amendment itself, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” This meant that once the war was over, former slaves could be arrested on trivial charges like vagrancy and loitering and turned into prisoners, and just like that…they were slaves again. Hence the image of men singing spirituals on the chain gang: a kind of legalized slavery. The link to “The Birth of a Nation” is that Griffith, working with actors in blackface, took the image of the “black criminal” and turned it into a demonic mythology that undergirded the 20th century. The “black criminal” became a monster to be feared and repressed, resulting in a vicious cycle that continues to this day: the presumption of black guilt in crime, leading to conviction, leading to incarceration, leading to a de facto systemization of imprisonment that is really the ethos of slavery in disguise.

In “13TH,” this narrative of racial tyranny is told with a nimble cinematic power that awakens your senses even as it sickens your moral center. Yet the film doesn’t become revelatory until it reaches the Civil Rights era, a moment when a lot of people (i.e., white liberals) began to congratulate themselves for having finally confronted the great American race problem and taken the big steps to “solve” it. Even if you acknowledged that we still had miles to go, no one denied that the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act — and the slow prying apart of cultural barriers that had begun to take place in the ’60s — amounted to the stirrings of a revolution. What DuVernay homes in on is the calculated counterattack waged by the establishment.

We all know about the rise, within the Republican Party, of the Southern strategy, though DuVernay features an extraordinary audio recording of Lee Atwater articulating it that puts a chill in your bones. And we know about the cataclysm of the assassinations, from Malcolm to Martin to Fred Hampton — though Van Jones testifies, with furious insight, about how terrifyingly it damaged the black community to have an entire generation of leaders stripped away. But the leap of perception made by “13TH” is to demonstrate how the Civil Rights movement, in spelling the end of the Jim Crow era, caused the white power structure to ask: What can we put in its place? How can we continue to segregate? The answer was the “war on crime” and the “war on drugs.” They were born together in the Nixon era, and they were always code for “Let’s put them behind bars.” DuVernay plays astonishing recorded testimony from John Ehrlichman, the Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, in which he admits that the government created a crackdown that targeted left-wing dissidents…and black people. But always with the excuse of fighting the drug scourge. “Did we know we were lying about the drugs?” asks Ehrlichman. “Of course we did.”

The “war on drugs” is, of course, far more associated with President Reagan, who launched his version in 1982 (with Nancy shouting “Just say no!” like a cheerleader from the sidelines). Many people reflexively went along with it, precisely because defending serious drug use never seemed like a viable alternative position. What happened, though, was that a health issue got turned into a crime issue. And selectively, hypocritically so. Think about it: If you learned today that a family member, or friend, or work colleague was a heroin addict, would you react by calling the police and having that person arrested? That would seem insane — but that’s what we did as a culture to thousands of inner-city drug abusers. In recent years, there has been much liberal criticism of the war on drugs as an epic waste of money and resources, but “13TH” — rightly — recontextualizes the war on drugs as a race war.

DuVernay keeps flashing a time-clock of the rising prison population. In 1970, it was 357,292, and by 1980 it had risen it 513,900. In 1990, it was 1,179,200, and it is currently 2.3 million. (Forty percent of those prisoners are African-American.) It’s the biggest U.S. growth industry! The terrible thing is, I’m not joking. DuVernay anatomizes the racist and capitalist underpinnings of the era of mass incarceration in a way that makes “13TH” an indelible act of social-political inquiry. The movie fills in each level of how it works, starting with the rise of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the lobbying club on steroids that unites corporate leaders and politicians, so that the corporate leaders can write big checks and craft the legislation that is then “recommended” to Congress. As the film reveals, it was ALEC that came up with the cornerstones of President Clinton’s 1994 crime bill: the mandatory sentencing, the “three strikes” clause, and so on.

The conflict of interest is stunning. For a long time, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest private prison company, was a member of ALEC, and so was Wal-Mart, which had a vested interested in playing up “stand your ground” laws because the result of those laws is that gun sales shot up (and Wal-Mart is a major merchandiser of firearms). The very notion that the American prison system is now being run by private corporations, with a profiteering interest in maintaining a large prison population, represents a fundamental — and indefensible — transfer of power in our society. The entire prison system has become a racket. The word for that situation is…well, I’m a film critic, not an editorial writer, so I won’t say the word. What I will say is: Watch “13TH” and draw your own conclusion.

There are some who may carp at the powerful case Ava DuVernay makes in “13TH.” Because her take on these issues is complex, she can’t point every time to a smoking gun (though her film has several holsters’ worth of them). Yet one of the staggering things this movie captures is how racism could be the driving force behind something as seismic as the rise of mass incarceration in America, yet that racism could remain in many ways “invisible.” So some people will be driven to say the racism isn’t there. But what they’re really saying is: It’s not a white people problem. A film as starkly humane as “13TH” makes you realize that it’s everyone’s problem.

Reviewed online, Sept. 29, 2016. Running time: 100 MIN.

• Production: A Netflix release. Producers: Ava DuVernay, Howard Barish. Executive producers: Lisa Nishimura, Ben Cotner, Adam Del Deo, Angus Wall, Jason Sterman.
• Crew: Director: Ava DuVernay. Screenplay: DuVernay, Spencer Averick. Camera (color, widescreen): Hans Charles, Kira Kelly. Editor: Spencer Averick.
• With: Melina Abdullah, Michelle Alexander, Cory Booker, Dolores Canales, Gina Clayton, Jelani Cobb, Malkia Cyril, Angela Davis, Craig DeRoche, David Dinkins, Baz Dreisinger, Kevin Gannon, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Newt Gingrich, Lisa Graves, Van Jones.

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’13TH’ Review: Ava DuVernay’s Netflix Documentary Is the Most Relevant Movie of the Year — NYFF

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Ava DuVernay ‘s documentary “13TH” has the precision of a foolproof argument underscored by decades of frustration. The movie tracks the criminalization of African Americans from the end of the Civil War to the present day, assailing a broken prison system and other examples of institutionalized racial bias with a measured gaze. It combines the rage of Black Lives Matter and the cool intelligence of a focused dissertation. DuVernay folds many historical details into an infuriating arrangement of statistics and cogent explanations for the evolution of racial bias in the United States, folding in everything from D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” to the war on drugs. The broad scope is made palatable by the consistency of its focus, and the collective anger it represents.

Visually, the movie offers little more than the standard arrangement of talking heads, archival footage and animated visual aids, but that’s all it takes to make its incendiary statements resonate across time. While not the strongest filmmaking achievement of the year, it’s certainly the most relevant — a scattershot survey that consolidates some 150 years of American history to show how the country’s current problems with race didn’t happen overnight.

“13TH” is a natural fit for Netflix , which will find an immediate audience for this topical subject matter in homes around the country. But it’s even more appropriate for DuVernay, whose career speaks with increasing volume to the challenges facing minorities today and their roots in the past. “13TH” is a dense, chronological overview that fits in naturally with DuVernay’s breakout narrative feature “Middle of Nowhere,” which involves an incarcerated black man, and her Martin Luther King Jr. biopic “Selma,” providing a sober-eyed context to the dramas they capture.

The title stems from the 13th amendment, which has been celebrated for abolishing slavery despite one troubling loophole that birthed a century and a half of persecution. By allowing forced labor for convicted criminals, the amendment enabled an angry, resentful white society to imprison newly freed slaves on minor charges — and, with time, enhance the perception of black criminality that continues to reverberate today.

The 13th amendment isn’t the only numerical element driving DuVernay’s essayistic approach. Onscreen statistics track the dramatic rise of incarceration numbers in the United States, from some 513,000 people in 1970 to 2.3 million today, pairing them with the widely-circulated assertion that one in three black men will go to prison in their lifetime. While that’s hardly groundbreaking information, “13TH” presents the talking point in a historical framework that gives it renewed power.

“13TH” is equally effective at outlining the minutiae of regulations that enable the oppression of black lives on multiple levels. Many of the movie’s subjects single out the American Legislative Exchange Council’s pre-written bills often used to enhance racist agendas, such as the Florida “Stand Your Ground” law that let George Zimmerman get away with killing Trayvon Martin. Going one step further, DuVernay’s collection of professors and activists explore the collusion between ALEC bills and the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), which benefits from harsh sentencing laws such as mandatory minimums that bolster the company’s prison business. Viewed in these explicit terms, the systemic racism emerges as undeniable fact.

“13TH” laces these precise targets with broader cultural observations underpinning society as a whole. DuVernay finds the “fear of black bodies” echoing across several eras, from the aftermath of the Civil War (captured in devastating black-and-white photographs) through the entire 20th century. While some of the transitions are blunter than others, DuVernay’s most effective device assesses the role of Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” in creating a triumphant narrative of white power that still haunts perceptions of black identity.

But the sturdiest ingredient in “13TH” is the testimony from people who clearly know what they’re talking about. Eschewing the distraction of celebrity activists, DuVernay instead turns to shrewd explanations from experts on black struggles. There may be no better voice for those concerns than the elusive Angela Davis, who has rarely appeared on camera since her early days in the Civil Rights Movements, but here provides a series of searing remarks about the systematic development of black criminalization.

With Richard Nixon’s drug war, she says, “crime came to stand in for race,” a perception that ossified in the Reagan years. Henry Louis Gates Jr. emphasizes the Civil Rights Movement’s ability to turn the problem of black arrests into a potential solution, while the professorial Jelani Cobb deconstructs “the mythology of black criminality.”

DuVernay pads these remarks with a few too many musical interludes to flesh out the 100-minute running time. It’s questionable whether we really need a break to read a few lines from Public Enemy’s “Don’t Believe the Hype.” But such minor structural issues, along with an abrupt ending, have little relevance in a movie primarily concerned with getting its point across in sharp intellectual terms. More polemical statement than cinematic achievement, “13TH” resonates where it counts.

Although its selection as the first documentary in history to open the New York Film Festival struck some as an odd decision, “13TH” is right on target to capture the tenor of recent narratives on black life. The movie kicks off a program that also includes Raoul Peck’s brilliant essay film “I Am Not Your Negro,” which fuses an unfinished James Baldwin manuscript with contemporary footage of the racism at the center of his critique. The lineup also includes Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight,” a personal tale of a young man who feels trapped by his black gay identity. (Nate Parker’s “The Birth of a Nation” didn’t make the cut at NYFF, but it also falls into this robust package.) DuVernay provides the big picture for all of these stories.

Coupled with an election campaign that explicitly addressed systemic racism, “13TH” is a true movie of the moment. Many of its observations also crop up in “I Am Not Your Negro,” where Peck also unearths racist portraits in popular culture and their impact across society. “White people did not act the way they did because they were white, but because of some other reason,” Baldwin writes, and “13TH” diagnoses the many causes. While not the most uplifting statement, it strikes a triumphant note by simply demystifying its concerns. Viewed as a whole, these movies explore the past and present not as separate moments, but as a single fluid pathway riddled with struggles — and always moving forward.

13th opens the 54th New York Film Festival. Netflix will release it on October 7.

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13TH Reviews

DuVernay boldly explores how prisons and detention centers are making a profit off of free prison labor, most of it done by black men which begs the question, is slavery really dead?

Full Review | Dec 29, 2021

DuVernay brings to bear all of her cinematic and storytelling skills to wrap a thoroughly researched investigation into a most compelling documentary about the long lasting but little known effects of 13th Amendment.

Full Review | Nov 30, 2021

This fierce and fearless documentary is so brilliantly constructed that its message is inspiring as well as infuriating.

Ava DuVernay's 13TH is essential viewing on the history of racism in America - and how the warehousing of black men in contemporary corporate prisons is rooted in the slavery of the past.

DuVernay underscores the blatant yet rarely discussed clause within the 13th amendment of the Constitution.

Ferociously intelligent, rigorous and impassioned, DuVernay's film is a battle cry for democracy.

Silence is oppression, and by being silent we become tolerant. Impressive documentary, terrifying truth. Ava DuVernay channels understanding today through the knowledge of the past. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Mar 1, 2021

13th will fill your mouth with bitter anger but, if there's a way forward, it's one a filmmaker like DuVernay can get behind. There's hope in the power of imagery.

Full Review | Jan 5, 2021

Ava DuVernay's scathing documentary explores the injustices at the heart of America's painful racial history by examining the systemic failures of the penal system.

Full Review | Oct 27, 2020

[Ava DuVernay] has made a searing, detailed exploration of racial inequality as seen through the prison system.

Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Jul 11, 2020

..a thoroughly persuasive and artfully crafted argument.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 4, 2020

While enormously stimulating and often angering, the film is not without its flaws.

Full Review | Jun 25, 2020

Ava DuVernay probes the dark history of racial inequality the haunts the U.S., paying particular attention to the country's prison system and the way it targets and exploits African-Americans.

Full Review | Jun 22, 2020

Brutal, necessary watch for all who want to understand why America operates with impunity re its horrendous treatment of Black people. Incisive and shocking, moreso now than when it debuted in 2016.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jun 7, 2020

...13th explores legal measures enacted to ensure African Americans are not truly free and equal, from drugs laws that disproportionately affect them to voter suppression ...

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Dec 31, 2019

From Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to Bulworth, the cause of political injustice always comes back to corruption. Ava DuVernay's documentary, 13th, follows a bit too glibly in this tradition-though it also, and admirably, transcends it.

Full Review | Sep 18, 2019

Systems of oppression tend to reinvent themselves, according to 13TH. Is there a way to move past them?

Full Review | Sep 11, 2019

What we have here is an honest-to-god portfolio of horror and insanity, an exceedingly well-structured talking-head essay on the (black) body politic...

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 15, 2019

With clarity and focus, Ava DuVernay traces a history of inequality that has resulted in the United States having the highest incarceration rate in the world, in her documentary, 13TH.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 4, 2018

The film transcends its plainness with the sheer force of its intelligence and content.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 4, 2018

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Common sense media reviewers.

Searing docu decries racial bias; intense violence, cursing.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Among the many messages, raises important issues a

For the most part, the interviewees have strong co

Violence is harsh, frequent, and REAL. Newsreel an

Two men are naked as they are dragged by police of

Infrequent but prominent: the "N" word, "f--k," "a

Parents need to know that 13th is a powerful documentary that addresses racial issues confronting America in 2016. In a time of polarized attitudes about mass incarceration, brutality, and the explosion of for-profit prisons and their affiliates, director Ava DuVernay interviews social activists, academics,…

Positive Messages

Among the many messages, raises important issues about the economic and personal exploitation of African Americans and other people of color in the U.S., with the intent of motivating citizen action to right terrible wrongs. Asserts that cheap ("slave") labor is an underlying cause of the distortion in America's justice system. Discredits "law and order" as a viable concept, instead sees the term as a code for arrest and prosecution of persons of color. Advocates sincere reform and separating the criminal justice system from any for-profit organizations.

Positive Role Models

For the most part, the interviewees have strong convictions, are highly motivated, and well-informed. Many of them are actively involved in efforts to reform a broken system. In an effort to balance assertions and correctly assign "blame," DuVernay places responsibility for current situation on both Democratic and Republican leaders.

Violence & Scariness

Violence is harsh, frequent, and REAL. Newsreel and videocam footage includes: rioting, beatings, lynching, brutality, recent killings (up-close) of African Americans by police, and people being tormented, intimidated, and threatened by law enforcement and fellow citizens. Men are kicked, dragged, stripped, caged, menaced by dogs. Scenes from earlier films depict attempted rapes and sexual assaults.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Two men are naked as they are dragged by police officers.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Infrequent but prominent: the "N" word, "f--k," "a--hole."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that 13th is a powerful documentary that addresses racial issues confronting America in 2016. In a time of polarized attitudes about mass incarceration, brutality, and the explosion of for-profit prisons and their affiliates, director Ava DuVernay interviews social activists, academics, journalists, and political figures to make the case that today's prisons, which house millions of persons of color, are simply the next incarnation of the centuries-old U.S. exploitation of those who have been deemed "lesser personages." Using archival footage and a clearly developed historical narration to bolster her contention, DuVernay's epic film is not for the faint of heart. The violence onscreen is not "re-created"; it gives prominence to actual beatings, murders, deaths from point-blank gunshots, lynching, and the profound intimidation and caging of both individuals and large groups of African Americans. Incendiary language (visual and audio uses of the "N" word, "f--k," "a--hole") as well as discussions of rape and sexual assault add to the impact of the story. Two men are naked as they are dragged by police officers. Provocative and heartbreakingly real, this documentary is recommended for mature teens and up. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (11)
• Kids say (7)

Based on 11 parent reviews

Succinct and powerful documentary about a complex and multifaceted topic

Amazing and inspiring, what's the story.

A reading of one sentence in the 13th Amendment to our Constitution is the foundation of Ava DuVernay's documentary, 13TH. "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." And, the "except as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" are the words that form the basis of her well-executed thesis. First, summing up the history of African Americans in the U.S., accompanied by the archival footage, newsreels, documents, and filmed speeches of past leaders, DuVernay declares that today's modern racial injustice is simply an extension of America's past racial behavior... from slavery to convict-leasing to Jim Crow and forward. Then, intercut with the footage, are in-depth conversations with prominent, effective leaders from both the African-American and white communities (academics, social activists, journalists, politicians). Organizing her material into concise, relevant sections, divided by animated titles with rap music on the soundtrack, the director and her team cover every aspect of the current controversial racial issues: moral, sociological, and economic. The film is a fiery indictment of the status quo, and an undisguised appeal to change it.

Is It Any Good?

In this fierce call to action, director Ava DuVernay effectively doubles down on both educating her viewers and inspiring them to take a stand against racial injustice in 2016 America. Hoping to provide a semblance of political balance to her efforts in 13th , DuVernay asserts that both Democratic and Republican administrations are responsible for burgeoning prison populations and the devastating effect of past policies on an entire minority population. Additionally, she interviews well-known conservatives, like Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist. However, given the evidence on screen, it's difficult to provide an "other side" of the film's arguments. Particularly compelling are sequences in which she identifies some of the most noxious corporations and/or organizations (Correction Corporation of America, National Correction Industries Association, American Legislation Exchange Council) that profit from and depend upon the rounding up of as many able-bodied men as possible. And she unabashedly includes the chilling footage from a number of recent police shootings of unarmed African-American men and boys. Challenging, disturbing, and confrontational, this film is must-see viewing for mature and concerned Americans.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the purpose of 13th . Documentaries always have specific aims: to entertain, inform, persuade, or inspire. How many of these categories are relevant to this film? Do you think director Ava DuVernay successfully accomplished these goals?

If this movie inspired you, what might you and/or your family and friends do to take action to change this situation? Some possibilities might be: actively working to elect like-minded individuals; recommending this film to others; joining and working with specific organizations that have influence in your community or on the internet.

What surprised you most about our country's treatment of African-American citizens over its long history? By the film's end, did DuVernay convince you that today's mass incarceration of Americans of color is an extension of slavery? Why or why not?

Movie Details

• On DVD or streaming : October 7, 2016
• Cast : Van Jones , Michelle Alexander , Cory Booker
• Director : Ava DuVernay
• Inclusion Information : Female directors, Black directors, Black actors
• Studio : Netflix
• Genre : Documentary
• Run time : 100 minutes
• MPAA rating : NR
• Last updated : February 18, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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‘13th’ Review: Ava DuVernay’s Searing Documentary Exposes Glaring Loophole In The Constitution

By Pete Hammond

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The words of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution were supposed to guarantee that slavery and involuntary servitude effectively were outlawed with the exception of punishment for a crime where the “party shall have been convicted.” That’s the loophole. And as detailed in 13th , director Ava DuVernay ‘s stunning and enlightening new Netflix documentary, the system of injustice in America has not changed all that much since the earliest days of slavery. The movie became the first documentary ever to serve as opening-night film of the New York Film Festival just a week ago, and I would say it should not be ignored at Oscar time in a year of increasingly fine documentaries.

As I say in my video review (click the link above to watch), the statistics DuVernay has put on the screen say it all: African-Americans make up 6.5% of the U.S. population but a whopping 40% of the prison population — in a country with the highest level of incarceration in the world, up more than tenfold since 1970 and existing mostly to put away black and Latino men. As her film points out, the chances for a white male to serve time is 1 in 17; for a black male, it’s 1 in 3.

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Shameful. But what’s really eye opening in  13th  is that it seems to come down to money. That was the driving force in the beginning, when slavery effectively was ended but the South had to figure out a way to balance the economics when suddenly they were short about 4 million slaves. Using that loophole in the 13th Amendment, Southerners started putting blacks in prisons for petty reasons and continued to put them into the workforce in that way without calling them “slaves.” Today the practice exists in many ways, making our prisons overcrowded and filled with minorities, the most vulnerable and underprivileged among us, who shouldn’t be there. Private prisons, which have become a hot-button political issue, exist to make money off of incarceration, as do other factors in a system that really is  rigged  against poorer elements of our society.

DuVernay and her co-writer and longtime editor Spencer Averick have assembled a remarkable prosecution of that system, detailing its beginnings with the end of slavery, right thru the Jim Crow South, the Civil Rights movement and up to today’s presidential election and the seething white anger and racism on view at Donald Trump rallies. D.W. Griffith’s landmark 1915 silent,  The Birth of a Nation,  again is trotted out as an example of how the Ku Klux Klan rose to levels of power they never should have been able to attain. A stunning parade of experts, historians, politicians and others such as Angela Davis, Sen. Corey Booker, Henry Louis Gates Jr, Michelle Alexander and the likes of Newt Gingrich are weaved in and out of the film to tell various aspects of the sorry state of incarceration today. I thought political pundit Van Jones was particularly insightful in his comments. Although there are a  lot  of talking heads in this movie, the way they are integrated into the vintage and contemporary footage DuVernay and Averick have put together is simply masterful. This is storytelling on a major scale, and a documentary that has tremendous value and importance.

Without getting overly political, DuVernay lays out the case in simple terms that “black lives matter.” As seen in this documentary, it is not so much a movement but an inherent human obligation to not only realize that but to  do  something about it. The director of  Selma  as well as the heartbreaking Sundance-winning indie  Middle of Nowhere —  which details the relationship of an African-American woman and her husband who is sentenced to eight years in prison — has made another remarkable movie to which attention must be paid. If it makes you angry, it should. It begins streaming today on Netflix and also is playing in select theaters. Find it any way you can.

Do you plan to see  13th?  Let us know what you think.

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’13th’ Review: Damning Doc on Racist Prison System Deserves an Oscar

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Note to the Academy: The Oscar for this year’s Best Documentary belongs to 13th, Ava DuVernay’s incendiary, indelible and indispensable document about the myth of racial equality in America. As we all learned in school, the 13th amendment – enacted on Jan. 31, 1865 – abolished involuntary servitude in these United States. Like hell it did. There was a loophole, which basically said no servitude “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Translation: If you’re white and rich enough to afford a lawyer, no problem, If you’re a minority with nothing, you’re fucked. Welcome to the era of mass criminalization and the prison industrial complex, where African-American inmates are forced into unpaid manual labor by a systemic corporate culture that profits from human bondage. Slavery is alive and well. And hot damn, do profiteers want it to continue.

DuVernay, with academic precision and fervent heart, marshals the evidence. Her talking heads, from Angela Davis to (yikes!) Newt Gingrich, illuminate the journey with blistering clarity. Yes, we’re heard some of this before, but only half listening, only half considering the appalling implications. DuVernay, as she has with her feature films Selma and Middle of Nowhere, makes it impossible to turn away. Her film goes by in a riveting rush, but astonishes in every frame with its ferocity and feeling. The archival footage is horrific, from a clip from D.W. Griffith’s 1915 race-demonizing, rape-baiting The Birth of a Nation to Donald Trump getting all nostalgic about “the good old days” when black protestors at rallies would get a solid police bashing and be “carried out on a stretcher.” One clip, showing a black marcher during the civil-rights era getting his hat repeatedly knocked off his head by a white mob, will leave you beyond tears. And the hatred is only growing. These days, there’s a new code name for police shootings of unarmed blacks: law and order.

DuVernay has molded her doc into a living history of slavery as an institution that won’t quit. Her voice, heard through a chorus of other committed voices, is a wake-up call none of us can afford to ignore. Don’t think it can’t happen here – look around, it is happening. 13th, available in theaters and on Netflix, is one for the cinema time capsule, a record of shame so powerful that it just might change things. Godspeed.

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Summary The title of Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th refers to the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which reads “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” The progression from that second qualifying clause to the horrors ... Read More

• Documentary

Where to Watch

Melina abdullah, self - chair, pan-african studies, california state university, los angeles, michelle alexander, self - educator and author, the new jim crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness.

Cory Booker

Self - u.s. senator (d) new jersey, dolores canales, self - formerly incarcerated activist, co-founder of california families to abolish solitary confinement, gina clayton, self - attorney and founder, essie justice group, jelani cobb, self - professor of african-american studies, university of connecticut, malkia cyril, self - executive director of the center for media justice, angela davis, self - professor emerita, uc santa cruz, craig deroche, self - formerly incarcerated activist, president, justice fellowship, david dinkins, self - 106th mayor of new york city (d), baz dreisinger, self - educator and author, incarceration nations, kevin gannon, self - professor of history, grandview university, henry louis gates jr., self - professor of history, harvard university, marie gottschalk, self - professor of political science, university of pennsylvania, newt gingrich, self - 50th speaker of the house of representatives, 2012 republican presidential candidate, lisa graves, self - executive director, center for media and democracy, cory greene, self - formerly incarcerated activist, co-founder, h.o.l.l.a., self - professor of sociology and law, northwestern university, michael hough, self - maryland state senator (r), american legislative exchange council (alec), self - founder, #cut50, founder & president, dream corps, critic reviews.

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Ava DuVernay’s 13th Is an Essential, If Imperfect, Look at Race Relations and Incarceration

The New York Film Festival has opened for the first time in its 54-year history with a documentary, 13th , directed by Ava DuVernay, of Selma . What’s surprising is that it’s not a formally innovative work but a conventional talking-heads doc, made for Netflix. Why did the good people at the Film Society of Lincoln Center give it this prestigious platform? I imagine because this is an election year — the most potentially cataclysmic in our lifetime — and the programmers want the film to reach a moneyed, influential audience and the media attuned to its responses. But they’re also paying tribute to film’s scope. DuVernay has attempted to give mass incarceration (2.3 million people in the U.S., 40 percent of them black), Black Lives Matter, and white racism an economic context. “Law and order,” the film argues, is a code phrase for a form of slavery that exists right now, unrecognized.

The title refers to the constitutional amendment that freed the slaves — but left them to their own devices in a crushed economy and a predatory culture. The irony, DuVernay says, is that the culture promptly recast blacks as the predators, the threats to social order as well as the virtue of white women. She invokes D.W. Griffith’s 1919 The Birth of a Nation to far greater effect than Nate Parker in his shockingly crude new film of the same name. (I was surprised that Parker’s film wasn’t chosen for the NYFF — until I saw it.) The point we’re meant to take away is that one form of slavery was replaced by another. Prison labor isn’t covered by the 13th Amendment.

From the outset, black leaders were criminalized and have remained so, even after Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. (I still have a bone to pick with DuVernay about her vilification of LBJ in Selma , which was specious, opportunistic, and, more important, unworthy of her.) J. Edgar Hoover brought the full force of his “bureau” on some of the most visionary civil-rights activists of our time. Fred Hampton was shot to death in his bed, though Angela Davis somehow escaped being killed or imprisoned and is interviewed (to great effect) in the film. Top Nixon aide and Watergate felon John Ehrlichman is quoted on the purposeful demonization of anti-war activists and the drug culture.

I have my issues with some of DuVernay’s subjects, who argue that crack, an “inner city” drug, was treated more harshly than cocaine, a suburban white drug. Maybe, but crack was and has been proven to be more addictive and more dangerous, and the crime in its wake wasn’t, uh, trumped-up. You’d think from 13th that crime didn’t exist. There’s no attempt to find a middle ground between the hyperbolic “super-predators” — a term we see then-First Lady Hillary Clinton throwing around — and genuine predators. (Yes, I am the stereotypical liberal who has been mugged — twice, once with a degree of force. It did not turn me into a reactionary, but I bridle when I hear that urban crime in the ‘80s was largely the creation of the media.) Nor does DuVernay mention that even as five innocent black men were arrested and convicted for the brutal sexual assault on a Central Park jogger, one black newspaper took to calling the victim, “the Central Park hussy.” It was insane time and we were all confused and scared — white and black.

But in the main 13th makes connections that haven’t been made in a mainstream documentary before. Republican strategists like Lee Atwater used Willie Horton not just to get George H.W. Bush elected over Mike Dukakis but to set in motion the unprecedented construction of prisons, some for-profit, all of which needed to be filled. Bill Clinton’s omnibus crime bill and three-strikes law made the situation even worse for blacks, and DuVernay throws a spotlight on the big-business-funded ALEC — the American Legislative Exchange Council — which turns out to be the author of many of the laws that have helped pack for-profit private prisons (which use virtual slave labor). The movie argues that this mindset — and a militarized police force — has made beatings and murders of prisoners epidemic. Lincoln Center moviegoers who wish to pay tribute to one of ALEC’s biggest allies — Koch Industries — can stroll across the plaza and wave at the David H. Koch Theater.

13th has its mannerisms. No one interviewed looks at the camera, which is almost always arcing around him or her. The movie is frankly exhausting, with too much information (and too many brilliant interviewees) to do justice to here. You simply need to see it. Even in its overreaching, it’s vital. And your jaw will drop as Donald Trump waxes about the good old days when protesters were carried out of rallies in a stretcher — and we see images of those good old days that prove they weren’t so good for blacks.

As for the rest of the festival, well: I’m still working through it. Among its treasures is Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight , a quasi-romance (emphasis on quasi, but with lingering romanticism) that hype would bruise: It’s so sensitive in its touch that the usual superlatives sound unusually crass. Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea is among the bleakest films I’ve seen in years, although every drop of its despair is earned. There will be much to say about the refugee documentary Fire at Sea , Paul Verhoeven’s provocative (to say the least) S&M drama, Elle , and so much more. This could well be the most provocative NYFF in years.

• ava duvernay
• movie review
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13th (2016) | Transcript

• October 25, 2023

13th is a 2016 American documentary film directed by Ava DuVernay. The film explores the intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States. The title refers to the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which abolished slavery throughout the United States and ended involuntary servitude except as a punishment for conviction of a crime. The documentary argues that slavery has continued in the United States by criminalizing certain behavior, convict-leasing, suppressing African Americans, the war on drugs, and mass incarceration. The film features interviews with activists, politicians, scholars, and formerly incarcerated individuals. It was released on Netflix on October 7, 2016.

[Barack Obama] So let’s look at the statistics.

The United States is home to 5% of the world’s population… but 25% of the world’s prisoners.

Think about that.

[Van Jones] A little country with 5% of the world’s population having 25% of the world’s prisoners?

One out of four?

One out of four human beings with their hands on bars, shackled, in the world are locked up here, in the land of the free.

We had a prison population of 300,000 in 1972.

Today, we have a prison population of 2.3 million.

The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

So, you see, now suddenly they’re in an awakening that, “Oh, perhaps we need to downsize our prison system. It’s gotten too expensive. It’s gotten out of hand.”

Um, but the very folks who often express so much concern, uh, about the cost and the expanse of the system are often very unwilling to talk in any serious way about remedying the harm that has been done.

History is not just stuff that happens by accident.

We are the products of the history that our ancestors chose, if we’re white.

If we are black, we are products of the history that our ancestors most likely did not choose.

Yet here we all are together, the products of that set of choices.

And we have to understand that in order to escape from it.

The 13th Amendment to the Constitution makes it unconstitutional for someone to be held as a slave.

In other words, it grants freedom… to all Americans.

There are exceptions, including criminals.

[Khalil G. Muhammad] There’s a clause, a loophole.

[Kevin Gannon] If you have that in the structure, in this constitutional language, then it’s there to be used as a tool for whichever purposes one wants to use it.

[Cobb] One of the things to bear in mind is that when we think about slavery, it was an economic system.

And the demise of slavery at the end of the Civil War left the Southern economy in tatters. Uh, and so this presented a big question.

There are four million people who were formerly property, and they were formerly kind of the integral part of the economic production system in the South.

And now those people are free.

And so what do you do with these people?

How do you rebuild your economy?

The 13th Amendment loophole was immediately exploited.

After the Civil War, African Americans were arrested en masse.

It was our nation’s first prison boom.

[Gannon] You were basically a slave again. The 13th Amendment says that “Except for criminals, everybody else is free.”

Well, now if you’re criminalized, that doesn’t apply to you.

[Michelle Alexander] They were arrested for extremely minor crimes, like loitering or vagrancy.

And they had to provide labor to rebuild the economy of the South after the Civil War.

[Cobb] What you got after that was a rapid transition to a kind of mythology of black criminality.

Go back and, you know, read the rhetoric that people used then.

They would say that the Negro was out of control, that there’s a threat of violence to white women.

So the same sort of image that we had of Uncle Remus and these genial, kind of, black figures was replaced by this rapacious, uh, menacing, Negro male evil that had to be banished.

[Gannon] Birth of a Nation was just a profoundly important cultural event.

[Muhammad] It’s the first major blockbuster film, hailed for both its artistic achievement and for its political commentary.

And when it was released, it had this rapturous response.

You know, there were lines everywhere that it was being shown.

Birth of a Nation confirmed the story that many whites wanted to tell about the Civil War and its aftermath.

To erase defeat and to take out of it sort of a martyrdom.

Woodrow Wilson, the sitting president, had a private screening of it in the White House. He calls it, “History written with lightning.”

And every image you see of a black person is a demeaned, animal-like image.

Cannibalistic, animalistic.

The image of the African American male.

[Cobb] There’s a famous scene where a woman throws herself off a cliff rather than be raped by a black male criminal.

In the film, you see black people being a threat to white women.

All the myths of black men as rapists was ultimately stemmed by the reality that the white political elite and the business establishment needed black bodies working.

[Cobb] What we overlook about Birth of a Nation is that it was also a tremendously accurate prediction of the way in which race would operate in the United States.

[Cobb] Birth of a Nation was almost directly responsible for the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan.

It had received this romantic, glowing, heroic portrait.

The Klan never had the ritual of burning the cross.

That was something that D.W. Griffith came up with because he thought that it was a great cinematic image.

So it was literally an instance of life imitating art.

The ripples emanate far out from just the simple fact that it’s a movie in the early motion picture age.

[Cobb] With the tremendous burst of popularity that the Ku Klux Klan had as a result of Birth of a Nation came another wave of terrorism.

[Stevenson] We had lynchings between Reconstruction and World War II.

Thousands of African Americans murdered by mobs under the idea that they had done something criminal.

[reporter] At the National Democratic Convention in New York in 1924, it is estimated that at least 350 delegates were Klansmen.

[Stevenson] The demographic geography of this country was shaped by that era.

Now we have African Americans in Los Angeles, in Oakland, and Chicago, and Cleveland, Detroit, Boston, New York.

And very few people appreciate that the African Americans in those communities did not go there as immigrants looking for new economic opportunities.

They went there as refugees from terror.

We didn’t just land in Oakland, in LA, in Compton, in Harlem, in Brownsville in 2015.

This is generational… generational trauma.

[reporter] The letters “KKK” were carved with a penknife on the chest and stomach of this man in Houston, Texas, after he had been hanged by his knees from an oak tree and flogged with a chain.

The Chicago Negro boy, Emmett Till, is alleged to have paid unwelcome attention to Roy Bryant’s most attractive wife.

[Stevenson] And then when it became unacceptable to engage in that kind of open terrorism, then it shifted to something more legal.

Segregation. Jim Crow.

[Alexander] Laws were passed that relegated African Americans to a permanent second-class status.

These things really begin to live out the prophecy that Griffith was making about the way that race operates.

And this fear of crime is central to all of this.

Every time you saw a sign that said “white and colored,” every time you had to deal with the indignation of being told you can’t go through the front door.

Every day you weren’t allowed to vote, weren’t allowed to go to school, you were bearing a burden that was injurious.

[Alexander] Civil rights activists began to see the necessity of building not just a civil rights movement, but a human rights movement.

[Martin Luther King Jr.] And I think we should start now preparing for the inevitable.

[crowd] Yeah!

[King] And let us, when that moment comes… go into the situations that we confront with a great deal of dignity, sanity and reasonableness.

[KKK member] They want to throw white children and colored children into the melting pot of integration, through out of which will come a conglomerated, mulatto, mongrel class of people.

Both races will be destroyed in such a movement.

[reporter 1] We just got a report here on this end that the students are in.

[reporter 2] Negroes were trying to integrate the bathing beaches.

And the Florida Advisory Committee to the US Civil Rights Commission warned that the city was becoming a racial superbomb with a short fuse.

[Alexander] Civil rights activists began to be portrayed in the media and among, you know, many politicians as criminals.

People who are deliberately violating the law, segregation laws that existed in the South.

[King] For years now, I have heard the word “wait.”

It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity.

This wait has almost always meant never.

Justice too long delayed is justice denied.

I think that one of the most brilliant tactics of the civil rights movement was its transformation of the notion of criminality.

Because for the first time, being arrested was a noble thing.

Being arrested by white people was your worst nightmare.

Still is, uh, for many African Americans.

So what’d they do?

They voluntarily defined a movement around getting arrested.

They turned it on its head.

[Cobb] If you looked at the history of black people’s various struggles in this country, the connecting theme is the attempt to be understood as full, complicated human beings.

We are something other than this, uh, visceral image of criminality and menace and threat to which people associate with us.

[protestors screaming]

We’re willing to be beaten for democracy, and you misuse democracy in the street.

Let us lay aside irrelevant differences… and make our nation whole.

[applauding]

[Gates] The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act said, “Finally, we admit it. Though slavery ended in December 1865… we took away these people’s rights, and now we’re gonna fix it.”

[Marc Mauer] For the first time, you know, promise of equal justice becomes at least a possibility.

Their cause must be our cause, too.

[Alexander] Unfortunately, at the very same time that the civil rights movement was gaining steam, crime rates were beginning to rise in this country.

Crime was increasing in the baby boom generation that had emerged immediately after World War II.

Now they were adults.

So, just through sheer demographic change, we had an increase in the amount of crime.

…and became very easy for politicians then to say, um, that the civil rights movement itself was contributing to rising crime rates, and that if we were to give the Negroes their freedom, um, then we would be repaid, as a nation, with crime.

[Stevenson] The prison population in the United States was largely flat throughout most of the 20th century.

It didn’t go up a lot. It didn’t come down a lot.

But that changed in the 1970s.

And in the 1970s, we began an era which has been defined by this term, “mass incarceration.”

This is a nation of laws, and as Abraham Lincoln has said, “No one is above the law. No one is below the law.”

And we’re going to enforce the law and Americans should remember that, if we’re going to have law and order.

♪ Breaking rocks out here On the chain gang ♪

♪ Breaking rocks and serving my time ♪

♪ Because I’ve been convicted of crime ♪

♪ Hold it steady right there While I hit it ♪

[Richard Nixon] Each moment in history is a fleeting time, precious and unique.

But some stand out as moments of beginning… in which courses are set that shape decades or centuries.

This can be such a moment.

It’s with the Nixon era, and the law and order period when crime begins to stand in for race.

If there is one area where the word “war” is appropriate, it is in the fight against crime.

Part of what he talked about was a war on crime.

But that was one of those code words, what we might call “dog-whistle politics” now, which really was referring to the black political movements of the day, Black Power, Black Panthers, the antiwar movement, the movements for women’s and gay liberation at that time, which Nixon felt compelled to fight back against.

Once the federal government, through the FBI, moves into an area, this should be warning to those who engage in these acts that they eventually are going to be apprehended.

[Cobb] There’s this outcry for law and order.

And Nixon becomes the person who articulates that perfectly.

[Nixon] There can be no progress in America without respect for law.

Many people felt like, uh, we were losing control.

[Nixon] We need total war in the United States against the evils, uh, that we see in our cities.

Federal spending for local law enforcement will double.

Time is running out for the merchants of crime and corruption in American society.

[siren wailing]

The wave of crime is not going to be the wave of the future in the United States of America.

We must wage what I have called “total war” against public enemy number one in the United States, the problem of dangerous drugs.

“A war on drugs.”

And that utterance gave birth to this era, where we decided to deal with drug addiction and drug dependency as a crime issue rather than a health issue.

Hundreds of thousands of people were sent to jails and prisons for simple possession of marijuana, for low-level offenses.

America’s public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse.

In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive.

This call for law and order becomes integral to something that comes to be known as the Southern strategy.

Nixon begins to recruit Southern whites, formerly staunch Democrats, into the Republican fold.

[Alexander] Persuading poor and working-class whites to join the Republican Party in droves…

By speaking to, in subtle and non-racist terms…

…a thinly veiled racial appeal…

…talking about crime, by talking about law and order or the chaos of our urban cities unleashed by the civil rights movement.

[Nixon] We have launched an all-out offensive against crime, against narcotics, against permissiveness in our country.

[Alexander] The rhetoric of “get tough” and “law and order,” um, was part and parcel of the backlash of the civil rights movement.

[reporter] A Nixon administration official admitted the war on drugs was all about throwing black people in jail.

He said, quote,

♪ The end of the Reagan era I’m like 11 or 12 or ♪

♪ Old enough to understand The shit’ll change forever ♪

♪ They declared the war on drugs Like a war on terror ♪

♪ But what it really did was Let the police terrorize whoever ♪

♪ But mostly black boys But they would call us niggers ♪

♪ And lay us on our belly While they fingers on they triggers ♪

Raise your right hand and repeat after me.

I, Ronald Reagan, do solemnly swear…

that I will faithfully execute the Office…

The election of Ronald Reagan was, uh, in many ways, transformative, in a negative sense.

President Richard Nixon was the first to coin the term “a war on drugs,” but President Ronald Reagan turned that rhetorical war into a literal one.

It’s back to school time for America’s children.

And while drug and alcohol abuse cuts across all generations, it’s especially damaging to the young people on whom our future depends.

The modern war on drugs was declared by Ronald Reagan in 1982.

As we mobilize for this national crusade, I’m mindful that drugs are a constant temptation for millions.

Popular opinion polls of the day show that it wasn’t an issue for most people in the United States.

But Reagan was determined to put this onto the agenda to define it as a problem.

A war against drugs is a war of individual battles.

Reagan used his wife, for example, in this “Just Say No” campaign.

She has helped so many of our young people to say no to drugs.

Nancy, much credit belongs to you.

This is your brain.

This is drugs.

This is your brain on drugs.

I joined it.

And some people said, “Well, how can you join a person declaring a war on drugs, someone like Ronald Reagan?”

I joined with Nancy Reagan because she said, “Just say no.”

Just say no so loud that everyone around you can hear it.

We’re talking about a general education that we’re talking about.

We’re not talking about locking up people.

We’re talking about educating people. We’re talking about prevention.

There was a crisis in the US economy at that time.

I regret to say that we’re in the worst economic mess since the Great Depression.

There is a frontal assault on institutions that are designed to assist human beings, on the education system, welfare, on jobs, healthcare.

Government programs that can’t be paid for out of a balanced budget must be paid for out of your pocket.

[reporter] The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

The idea of expanding, uh, the freedom of American business and the entrepreneurial class…

We will save $1.8 billion in fiscal year 1982.

[reporter 1] Luxury stores like Neiman Marcus predicts record sales.

[reporter 2] The number of Americans dipping under the poverty level has reached the highest rate in two decades.

Yes, there has been an increase in poverty, but it is a lower rate of increase than it was in the preceding years, before we got here.

It has begun to decline, but it is still going up.

[Mauer] In the mid-1980s, we were already starting to embark on a war on drugs and then all of a sudden, along comes this new drug, crack cocaine.

Steve Young reports on a new kind of cocaine called crack.

It’s dangerous. It’s deadly. It will kill you.

“The drug epidemic is as dangerous as any terrorist that we face.”

That is just some of what was said today to House and Senate committees holding hearings on drug abuse in America.

[Mauer] We have this drug that could be marketed in very small doses, relatively inexpensively, this was going to just take over communities, and particularly African American communities.

Crack was largely an inner-city issue and cocaine was largely a suburban issue.

Smokable cocaine, otherwise known as crack, it is an uncontrolled fire.

[Mauer] Congress, in virtually record time, established mandatory sentencing penalties for crack that were far harsher than those for powder cocaine.

The same amount of time in prison for one ounce of crack cocaine that you get for 100 ounces of powder cocaine.

[reporter] Police here are cracking down on crack dealers.

Usually black or Hispanic, Latino, they were getting long sentences for possession of crack.

You’re black with crack cocaine, you goin’ to prison for basically the rest of your life.

Um, and if you’re white, you’re pretty much getting slapped on the wrist.

Cocaine… was more sophisticated.

It was just a powder.

[Reagan] By next year, our spending for drug law enforcement will have more than tripled from its 1981 levels.

All of a sudden, a scythe went through our black communities, literally cutting off men from their families, literally huge chunks just disappearing into our prisons, and for really long times.

[Reagan] Millions of dollars will be allocated for prison and jail facilities.

[Cobb] These sorts of disparities under Reagan quickly exploded into the era of mass incarceration.

What Reagan ultimately does is… takes the problem of economic inequality, of hypersegregation in America’s cities, and the problem of drug abuse, and criminalizes all of that in the form of the war on drugs.

We absolutely should have treated crack and cocaine, uh, as exactly the same thing.

I think it was an enormous burden on the black community, but it also fundamentally violated a sense of core fairness.

When crack cocaine hit in the early ’80s, there were a lot of mayors who felt very strongly that this is a real threat and they wanted to crack down.

And Rangel was one of the guys pushing for stronger sentencing.

It may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but it sure didn’t work out as being effective.

Then, years later, there was an effort to rewrite history, that it was a racial disparity put in by mean white people.

Um, it’s not where it came from.

In many ways, the so-called war on drugs was a war on communities of color, a war on black communities, a war on Latino communities.

And you see a rhetorical war that was, you know, announced as part of a political strategy by Richard Nixon and which morphed into a literal war by Ronald Reagan, um, turning into something that began to feel nearly genocidal in many poor communities of color.

[Mauer] So Nixon’s Southern strategy was implemented right after the civil rights movement.

He played on fear of crime, and law and order to win the election easily.

Reagan promised tax cuts to the rich, and to throw all the crack users in jail, both of which devastated communities of color but were effective in getting the Southern vote.

There’s really no understanding of our American political culture without race at the center of it.

[Mauer] And in 1981, just before Reagan assumed the presidency, his campaign strategist, Lee Atwater, was caught on tape explaining the Southern strategy.

[Atwater] In other words, you start out…

♪ They claiming I’m a criminal ♪

♪ But now I wonder how Some people never know ♪

♪ The enemy Could be their friend, guardian ♪

♪ I’m not a hooligan I rock the party and ♪

♪ The minute they see me, fear me I’m the epitome ♪

♪ A public enemy ♪

♪ Used, abused without clues I refuse to blow a fuse ♪

♪ They even had it on the news ♪

♪ Don’t believe the hype, don’t Don’t, don’t, don’t believe the hype ♪

[Stevenson] The war on drugs had become part of our popular culture, in television programs like Cops.

When you cut on your local news at night, you see black men being paraded across the screen in handcuffs.

Black people, black men and black people in general, are overrepresented in news as criminals.

When I say overrepresented, that means they are shown as criminals more times than is accurate, that they are actually criminals, right, based on FBI statistics.

I mean, I’m a big believer in the power of media full of these clichés that basically present mostly black and brown folks who seem like animals in cages, and then someone can turn off the TV thinking…

“It’s a good thing for prisons, because, otherwise, those crazy people would be walking on my block.”

Creating a context where people are afraid.

And when you make people afraid, you can always justify putting people in the garbage can.

Chances are you could run into a kid waiting to relieve you of your purse or wallet.

Every media outlet in the country thinks I’m less than human.

I began to hear the word “super predator” as if that was my name.

Super predator.

[reporter 1] Super predator.

“Super predators,” end quote.

That’s the word they used to describe this generation, and it was very, very effective.

Experts call them super predators.

They are not just gangs of kids anymore.

They are often the kinds of kids that are called super predators.

No conscience, no empathy.

[reporter 2] A group of kids growing up essentially fatherless, godless and jobless.

For me, what’s disturbing is the degree to which black people bought into that.

Animals, beasts that needed to be controlled.

When those grandmothers say, “But he’s a good boy.

He never did anything,” don’t you believe it.

[Deborah Small] Black communities began to actually support policies that criminalized their own children.

[reporter] Last night, the eight teens accused of the attack were arraigned on charges of rape and attempted murder.

[Cyril] In the Central Park jogger case, they put five innocent teens in prison, because the public pressure to lock up these quote, unquote animals was so strong.

You better believe that I hate the people that took this girl and raped her brutally.

You better believe it.

[Cyril] Donald Trump wanted to give these kids the death penalty, and he took out a full page ad to put the pressure on.

These children, four of them under 18, all went to adult prisons for six to eleven years, before DNA evidence proved they were all innocent.

We make them their crime. That’s how we introduced them.

“That’s a rapist. That’s a murderer. That’s a robber. That’s a sex offender. That’s a burglar. That’s a gang leader.”

And through that lens, it becomes so much easier to accept that they’re guilty and that they should go to prison.

The objective reality is… that virtually no one who is white understands the challenge of being black in America.

So you have then educated a public, deliberately, over years, over decades, to believe that black men in particular, and black people in general, are criminals.

I want to be clear, because I’m not just saying that white people believe this, right?

Black people also believe this and are terrified of our own selves.

You want to go back to the days of military weakness, caring more about criminals than victims?

We can’t risk that. I’d like your vote on Tuesday.

[man] Leadership that’s on your side. Michael Dukakis for president.

In the midst of the, uh, presidential campaign, an ad was released about a person by the name of Willie Horton.

[announcer] Bush and Dukakis on crime.

Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty, he allowed first degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison.

One was Willie Horton.

This became a focal point of an entire presidential campaign.

[announcer] Horton fled, kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend.

Weekend prison passes. Dukakis on crime.

Dukakis had protected the program, vetoed an effort to repeal it, in that he favored letting murderers out on the weekend.

[Kilgore] That Dukakis had a double-digit lead over Bush before the campaign focused on Willie Horton, and after that, Bush overtook Dukakis and won the election.

[announcer] Which candidate for president can you count on to be tough on crime?

George Bush.

Bush won the election by creating fear around black men as criminal, without saying that’s what he was doing.

A very racially, um… you know, divisive moment.

Depicting an African American criminal, I think, was deliberate on the part of that campaign.

There’s no one who can tell me otherwise.

Liberals call him Willie Horton to make it sound like you’re being dismissive.

Original article was Reader’s Digest. William Horton, no picture.

The Democrats want you to know he’s black.

Thanks, Grover.

It was not his name, it was his image that was sensationalized.

Liberals that announced that it was mean to pick on a murderer and a rapist lose all credibility on this discussion. They just lose it.

And people go, “We don’t want to hear anything else you have to say about crime.”

No matter what anybody says or what anybody does, they know exactly what button they were trying to hit with that ad.

[announcer] Stabbing the man and raping his girlfriend.

It went to a kind of primitive fear, a primitive American fear, because Willie Horton was metaphorically the black male rapist that had been a staple of the white imagination since the time just after slavery.

[Muhammad] Here was a black man convicted of rape.

“I will be the savior and protector of the white population.”

Never minding the fact that the history of interracial rape in this country, that that record is far more marked by white rape against black women than of black men against white women.

[breathing heavily]

[Patsey choking]

[Cobb] This idea that had such great artistic utility in 1915 in Birth of a Nation still had a great deal of political utility almost at the end of that century.

The way that we appeal to voters’ sense of fear and anxiety in our nation runs through black bodies.

♪ Yo, lil’ Kadeija pops is locked ♪

♪ He wanna pop the lock ♪

♪ But prison ain’t nothin’ But a private stock ♪

♪ She be dreamin’ ‘Bout his date of release ♪

♪ She hate the police ♪

♪ But loved by her grandma Who hugs and kisses her ♪

♪ Her father’s a political prisoner Free Fred ♪

♪ Son of a Panther That the government shot dead ♪

♪ Behind enemy lines My niggas is cellmates ♪

♪ Most of the youths Never escape the jail fates ♪

♪ Super maximum camps Will advance they game plan ♪

♪ To keep us in the hands of the man Locked up ♪

[announcer] A new generation of Democrats, Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

They don’t think the way the old Democratic party did.

They’ve sent a strong signal to criminals by supporting the death penalty.

Looking at the way in which Democrats were defeated in 1988, or they were defeated in 1984, or they were defeated in 1980, there comes to be a sentiment among the Democrats that they have to adopt a position that is much more, uh, kind of, centrist.

It became virtually impossible for a politician to run and appear soft on crime.

I was not for the bill that he was talking about because it was not tough enough on the criminal.

[Stevenson] In an environment where everybody’s doing the same thing, everybody’s competing to be tough on crime, you quickly all end up in the same space, so it doesn’t become a political advantage unless you do something more.

We need more police on the street.

There is a crime bill which would put more police on the street, which was killed for this session by a filibuster in the Senate, mostly by Republican senators.

We’d consistently had, “Squishy, soft liberal won’t protect you.

Tough, conservative will protect you.” And we won that fight every time.

And by the late ’80s, early ’90s, people like Bill Clinton had begun to figure out they had to be able to match us.

I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States.

Bill Clinton is trying to figure out how he can deal with a country that’s still basically Reagan’s country, but he’s trying to govern as a Democrat.

Violent crime and the fear it provokes are crippling our society.

Then some high-profile, very horrendous crimes take place.

Residents pull together in the search for 12-year-old Polly Klaas.

They are now coping with the discovery of her body over the weekend.

[Mauer] Polly Klaas, abducted from her bedroom at home and ultimately killed, which led to the California “three strikes and you’re out” law.

When you commit a third violent crime, you will be put away and put away for good.

Three strikes and you are out.

A person’s convicted of their third felony, essentially that person is mandated to prison for the rest of their lives.

[reporter] So many third-strike defendants awaiting trial, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department is forced to release 4,200 misdemeanor inmates every month to make room for incoming three-strike prisoners.

It’s in line with many other policies we’ve created, particularly mandatory minimums.

“Mandatory sentencing.” We said we were no longer going to let judges consider the circumstances around a crime.

We’re just going to impose a mandatory sentence.

And that’s a difficult thing for judges because they are trying to dispense justice on a daily basis and are unable to do so.

[reporter] In many California communities, all civil trials have been canceled to catch up with the criminal case workload.

[Glenn E. Martin] We’ve taken discretion away from judges, arguably the most neutral party in the court, and given it over to prosecutors.

Ninety-five percent of elected prosecutors throughout the United States are white.

Serious, violent criminals serve at least 85% of their sentence.

[Stevenson] We passed Truth in Sentencing that kept people imprisoned for 85% of their sentence.

[Martin] Truth in Sentencing. You’re sentenced to an amount of time.

The public wants to be confident that you’re gonna do just about every bit of that time.

We’ve done away with parole.

So, in the federal system, when you get 20 years or 30 years, that’s what you got.

We had parole in this country as a mechanism for getting people out of jails and prisons when it was clear that they were no longer a threat to public safety.

Sharanda has spent the last 16 years in prison, and she’ll die there, because she was sentenced to life without parole.

Her only crime? Transporting cocaine.

And when I say “only crime,” I mean only crime.

She had no other arrests. None.

The judge was required… required to send Sharanda away for life.

[Clinton] Longer sentences, three strikes and you’re out, almost 60 new capital punishment offenses…

[Mauer] And then comes the Congress with a proposal for a $30 billion federal crime bill of 1994 that was heavily loaded towards law enforcement incarceration.

I propose a 21st century crime bill to deploy the latest technologies and tactics to make our communities even safer.

That omnibus crime bill was responsible for a massive expansion of the prison system.

And beyond that, it provided all kinds of money and perverse incentives for law enforcement to do a lot of the things that we nowadays consider to be abusive.

It will be used to build prisons to keep 100,000 violent criminals off the street.

[Stevenson] Not only does he increase funding to states to build prisons to lock up as many people involved in drug crimes, but also to put 100,000 police officers on the street.

Crime has been a hot political issue used too often to divide us.

What President Clinton did in 1994 is actually far more harmful than his predecessors because he actually built that infrastructure that we see today, the militarization all the way down to small, rural police departments that have SWAT teams.

[Cobb] And again we see this kind of notching up of the number of people who were being arrested at every level and this kind of exploding prison population.

[Cory Booker] We are a nation that professes freedom, yet we have this mass incarceration, this hyperincarceration, uh, that is trawling into it, grinding into it, our most vulnerable citizenry, and is overwhelmingly biased towards people of color.

[Clinton] But I want to say a few words about it.

Because I signed a bill that made the problem worse.

And I want to admit it.

His 1994 crime bill, something that he now admits was a mistake…

There were longer sentences.

And most of these people are in prison under state law, but the federal law set a trend.

And that was overdone. We were wrong about that.

Well, I think it’s important that President Clinton, um, acknowledges that things didn’t turn out exactly as he and all of us would’ve wished.

I’m happy that he realizes the error of his ways.

I think he knew back then that it wasn’t good policy, I’ll be honest.

Back then, there was an outcry over the rising crime rate.

And people from all communities were asking that action be taken.

Now, my husband said at the NAACP last summer that it solved some problems, but it created other problems, and I agree.

I’m glad to see that he is apologetic, but I think he has to take responsibility and accountability for that, and so does Hillary, because she supported it, then and up until recently.

[reporter] Bill Clinton faced off against a group of Black Lives Matter protestors protesting a 1994 crime bill that they say led to a surge in the imprisonment of black people.

I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent ’em out onto the street to murder other African American children.

Maybe you thought they were good citizens. She didn’t.

She didn’t!

[crowd cheering]

You are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter.

Tell the truth.

We can’t ignore the reality of force here.

The policies that Bill Clinton put forward, you know, mandatory minimums, three strikes…

Those were a use of political force.

They forced millions of people, who would not otherwise be in prison today, into prison.

They forced families to be broken.

They forced children to live without their parents.

That’s what happened.

[Jones] Why?

We shouldn’t ask, “Why is Bill Clinton so strong?”

We should ask, “Why is the black community so weak in our inability to defend ourselves?”

Let’s not forget how many martyrs we put in the ground in the ’60s and ’70s.

Let’s not forget how many of our leaders had to leave the country or are in prison.

You stripped out a whole generation of leadership.

You ran them out the country, you put them in prison, you put them in… in cemeteries.

And then you unleash this blitzkrieg, and we don’t have the ability to defend ourselves.

You can tell the story of white leadership in America and never mention the FBI one time.

You can’t tell the story of black leadership, not one, without having to deal with the full weight of the criminal justice system weaponizing its black dissent.

I’m tired of living every day under the threat of death.

I have no martyr complex.

I want to live as long as anybody in this building tonight.

[Jones] Dr. King, people forget, was not this beloved figure that everybody wants to put on a pedestal.

Uh, he was considered one of the most dangerous people in America by the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigations.

Don’t tell me that Dr. King has no relevance to young brothers in the street.

They dealing with little cops. He was dealing with the top cop.

[Malcolm X] We were brought here against our will.

We were not brought here to be made citizens.

We were not brought here to enjoy the, uh, constitutional gifts that they speak so beautifully about.

[Jones] Malcolm’s whole entourage was infiltrated with police.

He may have had as many police as he had regular folk in his entourage, under cover.

So afraid of black dissent.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover today asserted that the Black Panthers represent the greatest internal threat to the nation.

[Gates] J. Edgar Hoover said these Panthers represent the greatest threat to American democracy at the time.

The Panthers never were that big.

I mean, no one in their right mind could ever believe that the Black Panthers were gonna bring down the greatest military force in the history of the world.

The whole movement was criminalized and destroyed systematically by the government.

People haven’t thought about what it means to lose a Fred Hampton, who somehow was able to pull together blacks and whites and Puerto Ricans and Native Americans to fight for justice at 21.

We’re going to say it after this and after I’m locked up and after everybody’s locked up, that you can jail revolutionaries, but you can’t jail a revolution.

He had to go.

The head of the Black Panthers in Illinois was killed today by police in Chicago.

[reporter] Illinois Panther Chairman Fred Hampton and another Panther leader from Peoria, Illinois, were killed.

This is where our chairman had his brains blown out as he lay in his bed sleeping at 4:30 in the morning.

[Jones] They literally went and shot his whole house up, with his pregnant wife next to him in the bed.

So afraid of a leader that could unite people.

We know the history of folks who’ve done this kind of standing up to these systems, and we know how the system has murdered them, assassinated them, exiled them, excluded them, or found ways to discredit them.

Assata Shakur was one of the great leaders of the Black Liberation Army.

That, um, order given by J. Edgar Hoover was essentially to destroy any black, progressive…

Third World movement in this country.

[Jones] They put her in prison, and her allies said, “We’re not gonna leave her in prison.”

Her white allies said, “We’re not gonna leave her in prison.”

And pulled her out of prison and got her to Cuba. She’s in Cuba right now.

[Shakur] And within the next five years, something like, uh, 300 prisons are in the planning stages.

This government has the intentions of throwing more and more people in prison.

[inaudible]

[Davis] Criminalization of Assata Shakur, the use of the media to represent her as a dangerous criminal.

And of course, in my own case, where I was represented by the FBI as being armed and dangerous.

The FBI has put black militant Angela Davis on its list of the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives.

[Jones] Then with Angela Davis, the power of the black intellect…

[Davis] One thing that we have to talk about, coming to grips with, is this whole question of crime.

What does it mean to be a criminal in this society?

That had to be broken up.

[Davis] And in my case, Ronald Reagan was the governor of California, Richard Nixon was the president of the US.

The whole apparatus of the state was set up against me, and they really meant to send me to the death chamber in order to make a point.

The actions of the FBI in apprehending Angela Davis, a rather remarkable, uh, story again…

[Jones] The system tried to put the sister on trial, and the sister said, “No, we puttin’ you on trial.”

[indistinct chatter]

Comes in, the big Afro, she didn’t go press her hair.

She was facing major time.

You know, most people, they’d have got a nice little press.

You know? They’d have been in there with little white gloves on, praying to Jesus. She came in like this.

And she devastated the prosecution and walked out of there free.

[crowd applauds]

[man] But the question is how do you get there?

Do you get there by confrontation, violence?

Oh, was that the question you were asking?

[man] Yeah.

So, I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama.

Uh, after the four young girls who were… who lived very… who lived… One of them lived next door to me.

I was very good friends with the sister of another one.

My sister was good friends with all three of them.

My mother taught one of them in her class. And they went down.

And what did they find? They found limbs and heads just strewn all over the place.

I remember, from the time I was very small, I remember the sounds of bombs exploding across the street.

Our house shaking.

I remember my father having to have guns at his disposal at all times because of the fact that at any moment we might expect to be attacked.

I mean, that’s why, when someone asks me about violence, uh… I just, uh… I just find it incredible.

Because what it means is that the person who’s asking that question has absolutely no idea what black people have gone through, what black people have experienced in this country since the time the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.

[Jones] And when you strip out a whole generation of leadership, running folk out the country, killing folk, framing folk, you will be vulnerable to Bill Clinton or anybody else.

They’ll do to you what they will.

♪ There’s a man going ’round ♪

♪ Taking names ♪

♪ He has taken my father’s name ♪

♪ And it’s left my heart in pain ♪

♪ Going ’round ♪

[reporter] An armed neighborhood watch leader saw Martin walking inside a gated subdivision near Orlando.

He thought the 17-year-old looked suspicious.

[George Zimmerman] He’s got his hand in his waistband.

And he’s a black male.

[sighs] These assholes, they always get away.

[dispatcher 1] Are you following him?

[dispatcher 1] We don’t need you to.

[indistinct screaming]

[dispatcher 2] Do you think he’s yelling “help”?

[woman] Yes.

All right, what is your…

[reporter] A deadly shooting in Sanford.

Police have the gun, they’ve got the shooter, but they have not arrested him.

[Stevenson] Zimmerman, armed with a gun, followed this quote, unquote suspicious kid after the dispatcher told him not to.

They ended up on the ground in a fight, and George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin.

The police could not arrest Zimmerman because of this Florida law called Stand Your Ground, which says that you can kill someone if you feel threatened.

Even though it was Zimmerman who had pursued Martin throughout the neighborhood with a gun.

Mr. Zimmerman felt that he, in self-defense, needed to, uh… to fire his weapon.

[Stevenson] Not only was he not arrested, but in court, Zimmerman actually pleaded self-defense and got off under the Stand Your Ground law.

[woman] We, the jury, find George Zimmerman not guilty.

[man] That Stand Your Ground law that was passed in Florida played a huge role in the Trayvon Martin tragedy and this really ignited the movement that we see today.

[reporter] In the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death, Florida’s Stand Your Ground law came into the spotlight.

How did this law not only get in place in Florida, but around the country?

And all the fingers kept pointing back to ALEC.

ALEC sounds like the name of a high school lacrosse player who just got baked and wrecked his dad’s Saab.

But incredibly, it’s actually even worse.

ALEC is a political lobbying group.

[all] ALEC is a political lobbying group.

They write laws…

They write laws… and give them to Republicans. -and give them to Republicans.

Stand Your Ground…

was written by ALEC.

[Graves] ALEC is this private club, and its members are politicians and corporations.

But the real question is, should politicians and corporations be in the same private club?

Under the umbrella of ALEC corporate members, uh, get to propose laws to their political counterparts, most of whom are Republicans.

So, through ALEC, corporations have a huge say in our lawmaking.

And at ALEC task force meetings, corporate lobbyists secretly vote as equals with lawmakers on bills that those lawmakers then introduce to become laws in our states.

ALEC is everywhere.

Roughly one in four state legislators are members.

And I’m proud to stand with ALEC today.

And it’s not hard to see why. ALEC makes their jobs troublingly easy.

Here’s their model Electricity Freedom bill, which at one point says, “Be it therefore enacted, that the State of (insert state) repeals the renewable energy mandate.”

So, as long as you can remember and spell the name of your state, you can introduce legislation.

We’ve also seen ALEC bills introduced where a lawmaker forgot to take the ALEC letterhead off the bill.

Without remembering to take off the ALEC letterhead to try to distance the real role of ALEC and ALEC corporations from those bills.

I’m just curious. Does it have…

Does the legislation have some connection to ALEC?

Representative Atkins, I’m not sure why we’re pursuing this course of questioning.

This bill is my bill. It’s not ALEC’s bill.

The reason I ask is because earlier you passed out a handout that says “Gottwalt” at the top, and it says “Health Care Compact,” and there’s a logo right in the middle of that page.

And I went to the ALEC website, and there’s exactly the same font, the same size and the same logo.

I mean, literally, it’s verbatim.

[Graves] It’s shocking to know that ALEC has been around for more than four decades now.

And it’s even more startling to see how it began.

[Reagan] ALEC has forged a unique partnership between state legislators and leaders from the corporate and business community.

[Graves] Corporations have influenced laws for decades, through ALEC.

They want everybody to vote.

I don’t want everybody to vote.

As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.

[Graves] Nearly every ALEC bill benefits one of its corporate funders.

And the corporation Wal-Mart was a long-standing member of ALEC at the time that it adopted the so-called Stand Your Ground law.

It’s a law that created an atmosphere where gun sales boomed.

Wal-Mart is the biggest seller of long guns in the US, has been the largest retailer of bullets in the world.

So it’s reasonable to think that Wal-Mart benefited from these Stand Your Ground laws that ALEC pushed that initially prevented the arrest of the killer of Trayvon Martin, uh, and was designed to prevent the arrest, prosecution and conviction of the killer of Trayvon Martin, including through changing the jury instructions to require that a jury be told that someone like George Zimmerman has a right to stand his ground, but not that someone like Trayvon Martin has a right to stand his ground against someone like George Zimmerman with a gun assailing him.

After the outcry over Stand Your Ground and the Trayvon Martin tragedy…

Wal-Mart stepped out of ALEC. It left ALEC, abandoned ALEC.

But the Wal-Mart family continues to fund ALEC.

Other corporations followed suit and stepped away from ALEC, but many corporations are still members, including…

Koch Industries, State Farm Insurance, PhRMA, which is the lobbying group for the pharmaceutical industry.

ALEC has been supported by the tobacco industry as well as AT&T and Verizon.

And for nearly two decades, one corporation was Corrections Corporation of America.

[announcer] Every day, we serve our communities.

From small towns to large cities, at more than 60 locations across our country.

As the nation’s fifth largest correctional system, we build, own and manage secure correctional facilities.

[Graves] CCA was the first private prison corporation in the US.

It started as a small company, in Tennessee, in 1983.

These folks started making contracts with states.

And they had to protect their investments, so the states were required to keep these prisons filled even if nobody was committing a crime.

And in the late ’80s and early ’90s, this became a growth industry unlike very few growth industries in America’s history.

Uh, it was absolutely a model guaranteed to succeed.

[Graves] And one of the ways we see that is through the role of CCA within ALEC to advance a series of bills.

All the legislation you could think of that we fight so hard against, “three strikes, you’re out…”

…mandatory minimum sentencing laws…

…serve at least 85% of their sentence.

…were the ones they were putting out there like on a premiere pre-fixed dinner menu, a steady influx of bodies to generate the profit that would go to the shareholders.

[Stevenson] Through ALEC, CCA became the leader in private prisons.

It’s a multibillion-dollar business today that gets rich off punishment.

[announcer] We are America’s leader in partnership corrections.

We are CCA.

[Graves] And so, through ALEC,

CCA had a hand in shaping crime policy across the country, including, not just prison privatization, but the rapid increase in criminalization.

I think this accusation, you know, quite frankly, is just false.

That somehow ALEC was in favor of imprisoning a bunch of people, uh, because of private prisons…

I think that’s just, unfortunately, one of these tactics they do on ALEC.

ALEC pushed forward a number of policies to increase the number of people in prison and to increase the sentences of people who are in prison.

I’m trying to think how you address it. It’s hard to address something that’s like almost like folklore at this point.

They are not doing anything to really clean up that past or to address the real consequences for real people of the extreme policies they’ve pushed.

In fact, it doesn’t talk about its past history.

I mean, it’s hard for me to even understand, uh, what they’re even talking about. A lot of it.

CCA directly benefited, directly profited from its investment in ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council.

And the American people, in many ways, were harmed by these policies due to the mass incarceration of people, particularly people of color.

Look, right now our position is that we want less people in prison.

I don’t think that helps the private prison industry, quite frankly.

I think myself and the lawmakers, we’re just always looking for better, innovative ways to run government.

I think that’s one thing as conservatives, who believe in the free market and limited government, we pride ourselves on.

We’re supposed to be the party of innovation.

[Graves] Another bill that ALEC innovated was SB 1070.

CCA was on the ALEC task force that pushed that law that gave police the right to stop anyone they thought looked like an immigrant.

This law filled immigration detention facilities, and it directly benefited an ALEC member, CCA.

CCA could potentially reap huge financial benefits from SB 1070, since 1070 was designed to lock up a lot more people in Arizona on federal immigration charges. Cha-ching!

[reporter 1] An influx of undocumented immigrants, many of them children…

[reporter 2] In Arizona, Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA, holds the federal contract to house detained immigrants.

It’s worth more than $11 million every month.

Our, uh, immigration facilities are a disgrace.

There are families kept there, uh, in horrible conditions.

They’re called “detention facilities,” but they’re really prisons for immigrants.

Calling them “detention facility” doesn’t make them not a prison.

They’re a prison. They just have a different name.

We’re having what some people are saying is a creation of a “crimmigration” system.

That there’s the merger of our immigration enforcement and our law enforcement system.

And so, that’s some of the same things that were used in the war on drugs, are now migrating to other populations.

You heard it, uh, with Donald Trump, not about blacks but with Mexicans.

You know, “Oh, well, they’re rapists, murderers.

Oh, and by the way, some of ’em may be good people.”

Oh, boy. You know, where do you start on something like that?

[Graves] In late 2010, CCA left ALEC after a big NPR story came out accusing ALEC of pushing SB 1070.

ALEC doesn’t do anything on immigration.

No. No which way. Not to the right, not to the left. Nothing.

[laughs] So, I don’t really have anything for you on that one. Sorry.

ALEC has recently made what I would describe as a PR move to say that it’s gonna be right on crime.

That it’s gonna be on the right side of criminal justice policy and reform.

That move comes in the wake of its loss of a massive number of corporations.

What ultimately happened is our board looked at the issues that ALEC worked on and decided that we don’t do social issues, we’re focused on economic issues.

We jettisoned basically almost all of our legislation that was pre-2007.

So we basically… Fresh slate going forward.

A fresh start going forward.

[Gina Clayton] This industry knows that it’s dying… and is actually preparing for the next thing.

And the animating factors that have led to such a system like bail.

We’re always gonna see new permutations of a cancer. Right?

And that’s what this is.

And over the last couple years, since 2008, we’ve been involved really in a wholesale reform effort, where 31 states have now adopted positive changes on sentencing, on parole and probation reforms.

ALEC has a concerted effort to privatize almost every aspect of government, but we had no idea that they were also aiming to try to privatize probation and parole.

ALEC is no longer concerned about CCA and CCA’s interest.

CCA no longer has a seat at the table with ALEC, so it doesn’t have a financial interest in advancing policies that increase the profits of CCA.

But the American Bail Coalition is still part of ALEC.

Today, our state penitentiaries are filled to the brim and overflowing with inmates.

[Martin] When I think of systems of oppression, uh, historically, in this country and elsewhere, they’re durable.

And they tend to reinvent themselves, and they do it right under your nose.

One of the things they want to do is GPS monitoring.

Having a home confinement system for juveniles, I think, is a great thing ’cause it forces the parents to take responsibility and step up.

Prisons would be more embedded in our homes.

Some of them would be monitored on GPS and things like that.

So folks won’t be locked up in a cage, in a cell, inside of an institution, but they will have ankle bracelets on. They’ll have wrist bracelets on.

Would that help to solve the prison overcrowding problem?

Absolutely.

And what I worry about is that we fall asleep at the wheel and wake up, and realize that we may not have people in prisons in rural communities all over America, but that we’re incarcerating people right in their communities.

That is what I see, what a lot of the focus is on, is taking people from prison, putting them in community corrections parole and probation, and really investing in those programs.

How much progress is it really, if communities of color are still under perpetual surveillance and control, but now there’s a private company making money off the GPS monitor, rather than the person being locked in a literal cage?

If we can help you… save crime victims in your legislative district… you don’t mind me making a dollar.

[Graves] And so, ALEC continues to be a body that, while it may have some really strong rhetoric on why it supports crime reform now, suddenly, uh, sort of out of the blue, it actually has real financial interests.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

If you’re in the prison business, uh, you don’t want reform.

You may say you do, but you don’t.

And there are a bunch of people out there desperately trying to make sure that that prison population does not drop one person, because their economic model needs that.

Prison industrial complex refers to the system of mass incarceration and companies that profit from mass incarceration.

That includes both operators of private prisons, which get a lot of attention, as well as a vast sea of vendors.

From SECURUS Technologies, that supplies telephone services, that made $114 million in profits last year…

Those calls to family and friends are costing a pretty penny in state prisons.

They inflate the price that they charge the inmate and the inmate’s family.

[Kilgore] For example, in Maryland, if you earn minimum wage, you’d have to work an hour and a half to afford a ten minute phone call.

There’s also Aramark, one of the big food service providers.

In more than one state, they have been accused of having maggots in the food that they’ve served.

Corizon Healthcare provides healthcare services in 28 different states.

Multimillion-dollar contracts for this service.

Huge incentives given to contractors for very long contracts, so it’s actually a disincentive to provide the service,

because you’re going to be paid anyway.

One of the reasons it’s so difficult

to talk about mass incarceration in this country, and to question it,

is because it has become so heavily monetized.

A little company called UNICOR,

that does $900 million in business annually.

How do they do it?

-Also, prison labor. -[audience laughs]

[announcer] Partnerships between correctional industries

and private business

are a rapidly growing segment of a multibillion dollar industry in America.

[Shaka Senghor] We talk about sweatshops and we,

you know, we beat our fists at people overseas for exploiting poor, free labor,

but we don’t look that it’s happening right here at home every day.

You have corporations

who are now invested in this free labor.

It’s all over.

It’s from sports, uniform, hats, Microsoft, Boeing.

Federal inmates are making the guidance systems

for the Patriot missile system.

JCPenney jeans are made in Tennessee.

Victoria’s Secret.

Anderson flooring wood products are made in Georgia.

It’s always been Idaho potatoes.

They’re planted, grown, harvested, packed and shipped by inmates.

[man] Victoria’s Secret and JCPenney switched suppliers once their ties came to light.

Simply put, corporations are operating in prisons and profiting from punishment.

Prison industries have gotten so big that it’s very difficult now to try and do away with them.

Too much money out there, too many lawmakers that support it because they’re being lobbied.

So, the public’s got to stand up and take it back.

It’ll never get done if they don’t.

♪ And I can see it’s all about cash ♪

♪ And they got the nerve To hunt down my ass ♪

♪ And treat me like a criminal ♪

♪ Yeah, it is what it is And that’s how it go ♪

♪ Get treated like a criminal If crime is all you know ♪

♪ Get greeted like a nigga If a nigga’s all you show ♪

♪ A public enemy That’s in the eye of the scope ♪

[reporter] The night of his arrest,

Kalief Browder was walking home from a party with his friends in the Bronx, when he was stopped by police.

Kalief was, um, charged with a crime, a really petty crime, that it turns out he didn’t commit.

Then they said, “We’re gonna take you to the precinct, and most likely, we’ll let you go home.”

But then, I never went home.

They told you that you could post bail.

Yes, that’s correct.

And, of course…

I couldn’t make that.

My family couldn’t pay it.

There are thousands of people in jails right this moment that are sitting there for no other reason than because they’re too poor to get out!

We have a criminal justice system that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent.

Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes.

I think what most Americans think of, ’cause they’ve watched so many courtroom dramas and things like that, they think that the criminal justice system is about judges and juries.

Well, that’s really stopped being the case.

This system simply cannot exist if everyone decides to go to trial.

If everybody insisted on a trial, the whole system would shut down.

What typically happens is the prosecutor says, “You know, you can make a deal and we’ll give you three years, or you can go to trial and we’ll get you 30.

So, you want to take that chance, feel free.”

Nobody in the hood goes to trial.

[Rangel] 97% of those people who were locked up have plea bargain.

And that is one of the worst violations of human rights that you can imagine in the United States.

We have, in this country, people pleading guilty to crimes they didn’t commit, just because the thought of going to jail for what the mandatory minimums are is so excruciating.

[reporter] Kalief Browder decided, “I’m not gonna take the plea.”

So, you had to choose between being in prison for up to 15 years and going home right then by admitting you did a crime you didn’t do.

I felt like I was done wrong.

I felt like something needed to be done. I felt like something needs to be said.

If I just cop out and say that I did it, nothing’s gonna be done about it.

I didn’t do it. No justice is served.

[Stevenson] What you’re not taught is that if you exercise that right to a trial, and you are convicted, we will punish you more.

The courts basically punished him for having the audacity to not take a plea deal and to want to take it to trial.

In that time, those three years that he was sitting there and not being charged for anything, that’s when, um, the mental health issue started to deteriorate and he started to get into fights.

[Browder] After a while, I kept hearing the same thing from the whole three years, and I just learned to cope with just being in there, and that was rough. I already knew…

After a while, I just gave up hope.

Three years on Rikers Island, two of that in solitary confinement, and he was a child, a baby.

You miss everything. Everything about being home.

The fresh air, your family, certain events. You want to be home.

When they give you an offer to go home right then and there, it’s like, “I want to go home,” but then you know you didn’t do it, so you don’t wanna plea, take the plea and say that you do it, it’s not right.

I was scared all day because I didn’t know where it would come from.

I don’t know where any harm would come.

[man] Kalief suffered through so many beatings, both by the people he was locked up with and the guards, he ended up attempting suicide on several occasions.

After almost three years in jail, waiting his trial, they dropped all the charges, and he was set free.

[Senghor] He spent two years in an environment that people have argued is designed to break you within 30 days.

I mean, I can’t really tell you what’s next, but…

This happens every day.

[man] Two years after his release from jail, Kalief Browder hanged himself at his home in the Bronx.

He was 22 years old.

If I would’ve just pled guilty, then my story would’ve never been heard.

Nobody would’ve took the time to listen to me.

I’d have been just another criminal.

Prison industrial complex, the system, the industry, it is a beast.

It eats black and Latino people for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

[Stevenson] We didn’t even think about who gets the jobs of spending time with these folks.

Otherwise, we’d want social workers and teachers.

We’d want people with understanding of human behavior.

And we do the opposite.

[indistinct shouting]

[Dolores Canales] You become numb.

I think that’s what jail does to humans.

That immediate dehumanization and sensory deprivation that nobody can really understand unless they live through it.

So the last 14 years, my son has not had any human contact, other than to be handcuffed by an officer.

Uh, he doesn’t even have a window in his cell, and that’s one thing that really disturbs me.

It troubles me.

I just couldn’t believe it.

I couldn’t believe that we would even have such an architectural design in our country.

I never realized that there was prison cells built like that.

Human beings are not born to be locked up and encaged.

[Canales] Most people wouldn’t keep their pets in the kind of conditions that we keep people in.

Prisons and jails have become warehouses, in the sense that, um, where we’ve moved as a society is that it’s not enough to just deprive you of your liberty.

Um, but we want to punish you, too.

Most of the society, um, don’t understand what it means to be behind those big gates and those barb wires.

[Keene] Once somebody is arrested and convicted, they’re gone.

Nobody particularly cares about them.

In many ways, the prison systems are sort of in the dark.

So it makes it a lot easier, you know, cognitively and emotionally.

It makes it a lot easier to say, “Send people there.”

[Keene] If you look at the whole problem, you say, “What are we doing?”

We have too many laws locking too many people up for too many things, giving them sentences that are too harsh, putting them in prison, and while they’re in prison, doing very little, if anything, to rehabilitate them so that they can reenter civil society when they get out.

And then when they get out, we shun them.

Over 40,000 collateral consequences for people that come through our criminal justice system.

It’s that question, “Have you been convicted of a felony?” that appears on the job application.

In some cases, it can affect your access to student loans.

They can’t get many business licenses, food stamps if they’re hungry.

…private rentals in regards to housing.

It’s that question that appears on life insurance.

The scarlet letter follows you for the rest of your life in this country.

[Stevenson] In March of 2015, we had tens of thousands of people come to Selma to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the crossing of the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

And very few of those people realized that nearly 30% of the black male population of Alabama today

has permanently lost the right to vote as a result of a criminal conviction.

If you do something wrong, you should pay it back, and then move forward with your life.

But yet, in America, there’s absolutely zero closure.

We actually tell American citizens, when they pay back their debt to society, their citizenship will still be denied from them.

So many aspects of the old Jim Crow are suddenly legal again once you’ve been branded a felon.

And so it seems that in America, we haven’t so much ended racial caste, but simply redesigned it.

♪ You act like the change ♪

♪ Tryna put me in chains ♪

♪ Don’t act like you saving us ♪

♪ It’s still the same ♪

♪ Man don’t act like I made it up You blaming us ♪

♪ Let’s keep it one hundred You gave the name to us ♪

♪ We still in chains We still in chains ♪

♪ You put the shame on us ♪

We are now in an era where Democrats and Republicans alike have decided that it’s not in their interest anymore to maintain the prison system as it is.

Now, all of a sudden,

Hillary Clinton is meeting with Black Lives Matter activists, and talking about it.

It’s time to change our approach and end the era of mass incarceration.

She’s made a major address on it.

We will reform our criminal justice system from end to end and rebuild trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve.

President Obama going to prison, you know, as the first sitting President to ever visit a prison.

We’ve got an opportunity to make a difference at a time when overall violent crime rates have been dropping at the same time as incarcerations last year dropped for the first time in 40 years.

And conservatives, who were always seen or understood within the narrative as being the tough-on-crime ones, um, have now embraced justice reform.

It’s very, uh, man bites dog.

You see, Texas used to spend billions locking people up for minor offenses.

We shifted our focus to diversionary programs, like community supervision.

We got to ask ourselves, “Do we feel comfortable with people taking the lead of a conversation, in a moment where it feels right politically?”

Historically, when one looks at efforts to create reforms, they inevitably lead to more repression.

So, if we leave it up to them, what they’re gonna do is they’re gonna tinker with the system.

They’re not gonna do the change that we need to see as a country to get us out of this mess.

And they’re certainly not gonna go backwards and fix the mess that they have made, because they’re not ready to make that admission.

But as a country, I don’t think we’ve ever been ready to make the admission that we have steamrolled through entire communities and multiple generations when you think about things like slavery and Jim Crow, and all the other systems of oppression that have led us to where we are today.

So much fun! I love it, I love it!

We havin’ a good time?

[crowd chanting] USA! USA! USA! USA!

USA! USA! USA! USA!

Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! [spits]

[woman] Don’t you dare do that! Don’t you dare do that!

[Trump] Knock the crap out of ’em, would you? Seriously!

Get him out. Get him out of here!

In the good old days, this doesn’t happen, because they used to treat them very, very rough.

And when they protested once, you know, they would not do it again so easily.

I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you.

[clamoring]

[Trump] I love the old days.

You know what they used to do to guys like that in a place like this?

They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.

Yeah, it’s true.

Knock the hell out of that mouth.

The next time we see him, we might have to kill him.

[Trump] In the good old days, they’d rip him out of that seat so fast…

Shut up. Shut the hell up.

[woman 1] No, fuck no.

No, I will not shut the hell up.

[man 1] Why are you even here?

[man 2] Get the fuck out of here, man.

Get out of here.

[woman 2] Be respectful!

[man 3] I care about my son’s future!

[indistinct yelling]

[Trump] In the good old days… law enforcement acted a lot quicker than this.

A lot quicker.

[Nixon] And we are going to enforce the law, and Americans should remember that, if we’re going to have law and order.

I am… the law and order candidate.

We thought… I mean, they called the end of slavery “jubilee.”

We thought we were done then.

And then you had 100 years of Jim Crow, terror and lynching.

Dr. King, these guys come on the scene, Ella Jo Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, we get the bills passed to vote, and then they break out the handcuffs.

Label you felon, you can’t vote or get a job.

So, we don’t know what the next iteration of this will be, but it will be. It will be.

And we will have to be vigilant.

♪ I’mma prison cell Six by nine ♪

♪ Livin’ hell, stone wall Metal bars for the gods in jail ♪

♪ My nickname, the can The slammer, the big house ♪

♪ I’m the place many fear ‘Cause there’s no way out ♪

[Stevenson] The Bureau of Justice reported That one in three young, black males is expected to go to jail or prison during his lifetime, which is an unbelievably shocking statistic.

[reporter] Black men account for roughly 6.5% of the US population.

They make up 40.2% of the prison population.

We now have more African Americans under criminal supervision than all the slaves back in the 1850s.

The prison industrial complex, uh… relies historically on the inheritances of slavery.

[Senghor] The 13th Amendment says, “No involuntary servitude except for those who have been duly convicted of a crime.”

So once you’ve been convicted of a crime, you are in essence a slave of the state.

The stroke of a pen is not self-enforcing.

And so, while the 13th Amendment is hailed as this great milestone for freedom, and abolitionists celebrate, and this is the end of a lifelong quest, the reality is much more problematic.

Well, once that clause is inserted in there, it becomes a tool.

It’s there. It’s embedded in the structure.

And for those who seek to use this criminality clause as a tool, it can become a pretty powerful one, because it’s privileged.

It’s in the constitution, it’s the supreme law of the land.

Throughout American history, African Americans have repeatedly been controlled through systems of racial and social control that appear to die, but then are reborn in new form, tailored to the needs and constraints of the time.

You know, after the collapse of slavery, a new system was born, convict leasing, which was a new form of slavery.

And once convict leasing faded away, a new system was born, a Jim Crow system, that relegated African Americans to a permanent second-class status.

And here we are, decades after the collapse of the old Jim Crow, and a new system has been born again in America.

A system of mass incarceration that, once again, strips millions of poor people, overwhelmingly poor people of color, of the very rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement.

And so instead of talking about it, we just tried to move on.

After the Civil Rights Act was passed and after the civil rights laws, we tried to play it off.

Because we didn’t deal with it, that narrative of racial difference continued.

And it turned into this presumption of dangerousness and guilt that follows every black and brown person wherever they are.

[gun firing]

[officer 1 on radio] You need to get out of the street immediately.

[officer 2] Get out of the way!

[protestors shouting]

[officer 3] This is St. Louis County Police.

Stay off the roadway.

[Melina Abdullah] Ferguson was not simply about Mike Brown.

It was also this pattern of mass criminalization and mass incarceration.

[officer] Back off. Back off.

[protesters shouting]

There was an average of three warrants per household in Ferguson.

And so people rose up because they understood that they were also enemies of the state, seen as enemies of the state.

The communities in which black people live really become occupied territories, and black people have become seen as, um, enemy combatants, right, who don’t have any rights, and who can be stopped and frisked and, you know, arrested and detained and questioned and killed with impunity.

[Cobb] If we were to look at the larger-scale riots that we know of in, you know, our recent history, from Rodney King, to the Detroit riot in 1967, the Newark riot in 1967,

Harlem riot in 1964, Watts in 1965.

Every single one of those riots was a result of police brutality.

That is the common thread.

Fight back! Fight back!

Fist up! Fist up!

[Gannon] It would be a mistake to say, as many do in the current context, that if you’re against the police, then you’re against law and order.

These are hardworking civil servants putting their lives on the line every day.

And that’s true.

People who join the police do so, you know, to do these sorts of things.

But if you dismiss black complaints of mistreatment by police as being completely rooted in our modern context, then you’re missing the point completely.

There has never been a period in our history where the law and order branch of the state has not operated against the freedoms, the liberties, the options, the choices that have been available for the black community, generally speaking.

And to ignore that racial heritage, to ignore that historical context, means that you can’t have an informed debate about the current state of blacks and police relationship today, ’cause this didn’t just appear out of nothing.

This is the product of a centuries-long historical process.

And to not reckon with that is to shut off solutions.

We may have lost the sheets of the Ku Klux Klan, but, clearly, when you see black kids being shot down… then, obviously, we didn’t cut out this cancer.

For many of us, you know, [stammers] whose families lived through this, who are extensions of this kind of oppression, we don’t need to see pictures to understand what’s going on.

It’s really to kind of, like, speak to the masses who have been ignoring this for the majority of their life.

But I also think there’s trouble of just showing, you know, black bodies as dead bodies, too.

Too much of anything becomes unhealthy, unuseful.

I think they need to be seen, if the family is okay with it.

It wasn’t until things were made visual in the civil rights movement, that we really saw, uh, folks come out and being shocked into movement.

You have to shock people into paying attention.

But there’s a kind of historical trajectory that we can trace here, um, through media and technology.

We went back to, um, the slavery era, when people were writing autobiographies or slave narratives.

Later in the 19th century, when people began to use photographs and they showed images.

There’s a famous image of slave Gordon and his back, and you can see just this kind of lattice of scar tissue that is evidence of the whippings that he received.

Or the images of lynchings, which white people produced.

[Abdullah] The murder of Emmett Till was really thought of as being one of the primary catalysts for the civil rights movement.

The willingness of his mother to have an open-casket funeral.

Hundreds and hundreds of black folks filed past and see this young boy

who had been killed by white supremacists in the South.

To publish those photographs in black publications so the entire black world, like our Facebook or our Twitter now, right?

So that the whole black world could see what had happened.

In the 1950s, Dr. King and the civil rights movement used television in this way.

“Look, this is what segregation looks like. These are dogs attacking children. These are people being fire hosed.”

Searching for the medium of technology, that will confirm your experience such that your basic humanity can be recognized.

The difference now is somebody can hold up one of these, get what’s going on.

They can put it on YouTube, and the whole world has to deal with it.

That’s what’s new.

It’s not the protest. It’s not the brutality.

It’s the fact that we can force a conversation about it.

We have been consistently been murdered as a result of police aggression.

They generally would excuse it by calling us criminals.

When they was killing Oscar Grant…

[crowd exclaiming]

When they got to Eric Garner…

[Garner] I can’t breathe.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.

[Turner] Everyone pointed out that he was saying,

“I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.”

But the sentences before that were, “Why are you always stopping me? Why is it, day in and day out, week in and week out, you’re stopping me?”

And that, I think, is hugely important.

When we think about the children who were killed at the hands of the state, I think about Tamir Rice at 12 years old, and the way that he was killed, you know, it hits my heart.

[officer] Go ahead and take your seat belt off. Stop. Stop!

[man] You good?

[rapid beeping]

[man 1 shouting indistinctly]

[officer 1] Roll on your stomach. Now!

[woman] Stop fighting!

[officer 1] I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

[Harris exclaims] Oh, shit.

He shot me, man. I was shot.

[officer 2] He didn’t do shit. You didn’t.

[Harris groans] I’m losing breath.

[officer 2] Fuck your breath.

[woman] Stay with me.

We got pulled over for a busted taillight in the back.

[Alexander] Police violence, that isn’t the problem in and of itself.

It’s reflection of a much larger, brutal system of racial and social control known as mass incarceration, which authorizes this kind of police violence.

That’s why, for me, the brilliance of Black Lives Matter…

They have a distributed leadership model. You can’t find their address.

I mean, Black Lives Matter is not a stoppable phenomenon, by a bullet or anything else.

And so, there’s hope there because of that.

Having people truly understand that when black lives matter, everybody’s life matters, including every single person that enters this criminal justice system and this prison industrial complex.

It’s not just even about only black lives, right?

It’s about changing the way this country understands human dignity.

[Cobb] That’s what, really, this Black Lives Matter moment is about.

This question of whose life do we recognize as valuable?

[Jones] The opposite of criminalization is humanization.

That’s the one thing I hope that people will understand.

It’s about rehumanizing us, as a people, and us, right, as a people, all of us.

The system of mass incarceration has grown, and sprawled and developed an appetite that is gobbling up people in communities of all colors.

But if it hadn’t been for the fact that it began with a group of people defined by race, that we as a nation have learned not to care about, we wouldn’t be talking about two million people behind bars today.

People say all the time, “I don’t understand how people could’ve tolerated slavery. How could they have made peace with that? How could people have gone to a lynching and participated in that? How did people make sense of the segregation, this white and colored-only drinking… That’s so crazy. If I was living at that time, I would have never tolerated anything like that.”

And the truth is, we are living at this time, and we are tolerating it.

♪ Southern leaves Southern trees we hung from ♪

♪ Barren souls Heroic songs unsung ♪

♪ Forgive them, Father They know this knot is undone ♪

♪ Tied with the rope That my grandmother dyed ♪

♪ Pride of the pilgrims Affect lives of millions ♪

♪ Since slave day Separatin’ fathers from children ♪

♪ Institution ain’t just a building But a method ♪

♪ Of having black and brown bodies Fill them ♪

♪ We ain’t seen As human beings with feelings ♪

♪ Will the US ever be us, Lord willing? ♪

♪ For now we know the new Jim Crow ♪

♪ The stop search and arrest our souls ♪

♪ Police and policies Patrol philosophies of control ♪

♪ A cruel hand taking hold ♪

♪ We let go to free them So we can free us ♪

♪ America’s moment to come to Jesus ♪

♪ Freedom ♪

♪ Freedom come ♪

♪ Hold on ♪

♪ Won’t be long ♪

♪ Hold on ♪ ♪ Hold on ♪

♪ The cage bird sings For freedom in the ring ♪

♪ Black bodies bein’ lost In the American Dream ♪

♪ Blood of black being a pastoral scene ♪

♪ Slavery’s still alive Check Amendment 13 ♪

♪ Now whips and chains are subliminal ♪

♪ Instead of nigga They use the word criminal ♪

♪ Sweet land of liberty Incarcerated country ♪

♪ Shot me with your Reagan And now you wanna Trump me ♪

♪ Prison is a business America’s the company ♪

♪ Investing in injustice, fear And long suffering ♪

♪ We’re staring in the face Of hate again ♪

♪ The same hate they say Will make America great again ♪

♪ No consolation prize For the dehumanized ♪

♪ For America to rise Is a matter of black lives ♪

♪ And we gonna free them So we can free us ♪

♪ Oh, freedom ♪

• More: 13th (film) , Ava DuVernay , Documentary

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'The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed' Review: A Bold Comedy

Joanna Arnow's feature debut is the funniest movie of the year thus far.

The Big Picture

• Joanna Arnow's feature debut The Feeling That The Time For Doing Something Has Passed is a sharply hilarious comedy, tackling the absurdities of relationships and everyday life.
• Ann's personal journey explores shifting desires, settling into new routines, and quietly tumultuous times.
• The film's ending is subtly sidesplitting and melancholic, with an unexpectedly revealing final joke.

When watching The Feeling That The Time For Doing Something Has Passed , the brilliant comedy from writer-director Joanna Arnow in which she also stars, both comedy and tragedy are expertly wielded in her hands. Not only is Arnow's debut feature perfectly attuned to the often mundane rhythms of life in New York, but it also sees her giving a fearless central performance . She gives everything to the humble film and the result is a comedic gem that is all its own. There is never a single moment where it feels like she or the film feels like it is even remotely compromising on the portrait being painted. Forget Fifty Shades of Grey , this is the film about BDSM for our time that is right up there with the recent Sanctuary .

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed

A mosaic-style comedy following the life of a woman as time passes in her long-term casual BDSM relationship, low-level corporate job, and quarrelsome Jewish family.

What makes it a cut above is how Arnow weaves the complicated absurdities and relationships into the fabric of everyday life. We see the indignity of work where those in charge remain woefully out of touch with the realities of their industries just as we observe how Ann is willing to keep going back to a relationship where she is treated awfully if it represents what could be a familliar escape from everything else. It is frequently sad, consistently silly, and increasingly somber all at once .

What Is 'The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed' About?

This begins with Arnow’s naked Ann as she tries to get the attention of a man who is sleeping (or at least pretending to) next to her. Despite all her efforts, including talking dirty to him and humping against his body, Allen ( Scott Cohen ) can’t even be bothered to give her a second thought. How much of this is part of their dominant and submissive relationship versus him just being an asshole is the central tension that the film begins to excavate. As we get immersed in Ann’s painfully relatable day-to-day life, mostly consisting of strained family interactions, the most uniquely disgusting microwave meals you’ve ever seen, and a banal workplace overseen by incompetent management, the more humorously horrifying reality sets in that this relationship is the thing that may just be the bright spot in her life .

This has been going on for a decade with neither knowing much about the other. That Allen continually forgets (or pretends to forget) where she went to college elicits an effective sense of unease and discomfort even as Ann remains seemingly unperturbed by it all. At the same time, she bares both body and soul as we get to know her life so deeply that it feels like an epic novel has almost been condensed into a tight feature that runs under ninety minutes. It can all feel fleeting, but that is also the film’s greatest achievement. Is life not just a series of moments embarrassing, arousing, painful, funny, and sad before we all die? And, just as importantly, what would it be like to recreate that classic scene from the Titanic ?

The way Arnow, who also serves as editor on the film, stitches this all together is perfection . Everything from the pacing to the precise moment when she cuts mines plenty of unexpected jokes and humor as various scenes come crashing into each other. While it would not be entirely correct to call any of the individual parts vignettes, they all pack their own individual strengths that then come together into a magnificent whole. As Ann drifts away from Allen to pursue other sexual relationships, we get snapshots of the variety of people and personalities seeking submissives. Some of these people are sweet while most are just strange. However, most importantly, never once does the film feel like it is shaming anyone or capturing their relationships as something inherently ridiculous. Each one of them is painfully human.

'The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed' Is a Magnificent Feature Deubt

Arnow teases out some great punchlines, from when a boomer boss talks inanely about the iPhone to when Ann’s mother tells her to not forget about bringing a banana on a trip, which are so oddly authentic it almost hurts . It ensures that amidst all the stellar jokes is an almost profound sense of both a place and people. Sure, there are sex gags galore that involve everything from pig noses to virtual masturbating. The key is that all of these things go hand in hand with the unendingly funny though no less incisive ideas that Arnow is playing around with. In every awkward encounter, something increasingly astounding is sneaking up on you.

The key is that each of these is deeply tied up in the personal journey of Ann as she tries to piece together what it is that she wants. There is no grand moment where she gives a speech about finally knowing how to live her life to the fullest. Instead, she seeks out a more romantic connection that she is hoping can also fulfill her desire to be a submissive. It’s this moment when the film shifts gears just a bit, slowing down from the rapid succession of encounters she was having before, in a way that could easily throw some those who had gotten used to its rhythms. This is no accident as it is about making us feel how a shift in life after years of settling into a routine, no matter how painful, can itself be a quietly tumultuous time .

Without going too far into the ending or a single interpretation, as Arnow’s vision is bursting with a variety of meanings to be discovered on multiple watches, there is a moment near the conclusion where a character in the film says a slightly different version of its title to Ann. That her response is the experience’s most revealing and almost entirely the opposite of what was being said provides one last subtly sidesplitting joke. This is followed by Arnow pulling off one more devastating cut that makes you almost want to shout as it rips us right back to how we began the film. In the end, Ann ends up embodying the title without even fully realizing it. It makes for a final moment of melancholy where all you can do is lay back and see the next decade stretching before her once more. What a frighteningly funny sight it is .

Joanna Arnow's The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed is a magnificent feature debut and the funniest films of the year thus far.

• Arnow gives a fearless central performance, baring both body and soul at every turn.
• In addition to being both writer and director, Arnow does a spectacular job of editing the film's already great scene into a wonderful whole.
• The ending ties all this together wonderfully, bringing the film full circle and providing one last devastating punchline.

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed comes to select theaters in the U.S. starting April 26 before expanding. Click below for showtimes near you.

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A Man in Full review – skin-crawling Trump satire is a worthy Succession replacement

Jeff Daniels rages as a crooked real-estate mogul staring into the abyss of bankruptcy in this lavish take on Tom Wolfe’s novel. It’s just a shame the swearing can’t compete with the real deal

A Man in Full is largely about dicks. Metaphorical, mostly, but with the occasional real one popping up to cause trouble here and there.

The biggest metaphorical dick in this six-part Netflix adaptation by David E Kelley of Tom Wolfe’s satirical novel is Charlie Croker (Jeff Daniels). He is a good ol’ boy, Atlanta born and raised, turned real-estate mogul who has enjoyed swinging his appendage all over the state for his many years on the rise. Shortly after his lavish 60th birthday, however, he is summoned by the bank for what he thinks will be a simple refinancing meeting, only to find that they are calling in the nearly $1bn of loans they have made to him. Why? Because, explains banking head Harry Zale (Bill Camp), who could not be enjoying this more, “I am talking to a shithead about one of the worst cases of mismanagement I’ve ever seen.” The bank reckons too much has been spent on private jets, lavish 60th birthday parties and – above all – a private quail plantation for hunting and not enough on actual business. Croker is technically bankrupt. The party, and the quail hunting, is over.

Also at the meeting and barely able to keep his grin of satisfaction to himself is Croker employee turned nark Raymond Peepgrass (Tom Pelphrey, producing an absolutely skin-crawling performance throughout). It’s not all fun and games for him though, as his own (actual) dick has recently impregnated a young eastern European woman (“Also, I let him put it in anus”) who now wants $700,000 to compensate for the inconvenience of giving birth to his son.

Among the others involved and/or invested in Croker’s impending fall are his first wife Martha (Diane Lane, most recently seen in Feud: Capote vs the Swans and cementing here her welcome mid-life career resurgence), whose assets may not be as disentangled from her ex-husband’s as she had hoped, Martha’s best friend Joyce (Lucy Liu) who becomes a vital part of a second plot strand emerging slightly later on, and – most harrowingly – his receptionist Jill Hensley (Chanté Adams) and her husband Conrad (Jon Michael Hill). They are Black, and when Conrad becomes caught up in a police brutality case, his situation – aggravated by the furiously racist judge overseeing it – rapidly descends into nightmare. Charlie provides the pair with one of his lawyers, Roger White (Aml Ameen) and with other help, but as he is further distracted by his own problems, the Hensleys only suffer more.

White has his own problems too. His old college pal Wes Jordan (William Jackson Harper) is the mayor of Atlanta and running for office again, this time against a dangerous Maga-esque candidate, who could win. Unless the rumours that he sexually assaulted a women back when he used to pal around with White’s boss are true … Could Roger dig around and see if Charlie knows anything he could use? An unethical thing to do, sure, but it’s for the greater good of Atlanta, and its Black population especially.

With Kelley at the helm and Regina King directing, it was hardly in doubt that a smart, propulsive drama would unfold and A Man in Full is very much that. And, of course, although Charlie Croker is a better man than Trump (and, fictional or not, a deeper and more nuanced character), the tale of a man who has built most of his overvalued empire on confidence, bullying and bluster rather than sound business sense is timely. Though (possibly unlike Trump) Daniels’ Croker is not quite unpleasant enough to have you rooting for a painfully humiliating financial demise; you feel you won’t be shedding many tears if it comes to pass.

If, however, as seems likely, A Man in Full is Netflix’s attempt to capture the post-Succession audience, it may have a way to go. The new series is a solid, satisfying thing but it lacks a true satirical edge and it lacks flair. Every line in Succession was whetted to the finest edge and the whole thing was fired by an extraordinary rage, fierce intelligence and a profound knowledge of its characters and the world in which their real-life counterparts live. A Man in Full is a fine adaptation of Wolfe’s novel, but even the plentiful invective (“Time to take a Clydesdale piss on that man’s head”) cannot measure up to that side of Jesse Armstrong’s creation. A Man in Full is workmanlike in comparison. But perhaps that’s invidious. Standing alone, it is more than good enough.

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The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim

The untold story behind Helm's Deep, hundreds of years before the fateful war, telling the life and bloodsoaked times of its founder, Helm Hammerhand, the King of Rohan. The untold story behind Helm's Deep, hundreds of years before the fateful war, telling the life and bloodsoaked times of its founder, Helm Hammerhand, the King of Rohan. The untold story behind Helm's Deep, hundreds of years before the fateful war, telling the life and bloodsoaked times of its founder, Helm Hammerhand, the King of Rohan.

• Kenji Kamiyama
• Jeffrey Addiss
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• Trivia Set 183 years before the events of "The Lord of the Rings".
• Connections Referenced in AniMat's Crazy Cartoon Cast: Geeked Week for Freaks (2021)

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'The Fall Guy' an escapist treat rich with spectacular action, romantic banter

When you’ve got jaw-dropping stunts and the playful chemistry of ryan gosling and emily blunt, who cares whether the plot holds up.

A nearby explosion doesn’t stop a passionate moment between filmmaker Judy (Emily Blunt) and stuntman Colt (Ryan Gosling) in “The Fall Guy.”

Universal Pictures

How’s this for a Hollywood Full Circle story for you:

David Leitch was Brad Pitt’s stunt double on “Fight Club” and a number of other projects. Brad Pitt played a stunt double in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” David Leitch eventually became a top-tier action filmmaker, directing “Atomic Blonde,” “Deadpool 2” — and “Bullet Train,” starring Brad Pitt.

Now comes Leitch’s rousing and action-packed and funny and even heartwarming “The Fall Guy,” with Ryan Gosling playing a stuntman who often doubles for Hollywood’s biggest star — just as David Leitch once doubled for Brad Pitt. Ta-da! (Sidebar: This is the THIRD time Gosling has played some kind of stunt performer, after “Drive” and “The Place Beyond the Pines.”)

Loosely inspired by the Lee Majors-starring TV show from the 1980s and given a rocket-booster jolt of stardom from the pairing of Gosling and Emily Blunt, “The Fall Guy” is pure popcorn entertainment — an absolutely ludicrous yet consistently entertaining, old-fashioned action/romance combo platter that plays like a feature-length pitch to the Academy to add a best stunts category (as it should).

If you’re looking for anything more than an escapist adventure featuring two of our brightest stars exchanging banter in between kissing scenes, set against the backdrop of some jaw-dropping practical effects stunts (mostly performed, of course, by doubles who are filling in for Gosling), you’ve wandered into the wrong theater. The screenplay often falls back on lazy clichés (karaoke sequence, anyone?) and the final act takes place in a universe that has no connection to anything resembling reality, but the action sequences and the playful chemistry between Gosling and Blunt save the day.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays the arrogant movie star who lies about doing his own stunts.

“The Fall Guy” opens with Gosling’s Colt Seavers on the set of an action film starring the global superstar Tom Ryder (a self-deprecating Aaron Taylor-Johnson), an arrogant egomaniac who is constantly bragging about doing his own stunts. (Spoiler alert: He’s lying.) Colt doesn’t care about Ryder’s dismissive attitude toward him; he’s too busy gushing about the love affair he’s having with Emily Blunt’s Jody Moreno, a camera operator on the film. Why, it’s the stuff of movies!

Fast forward 18 months. After a near-fatal accident on that set, Colt is a broken man in more ways than one. He’s retired from stunt work, he has a job as a valet, and he has fallen off the grid. When the powerful producer Gail Meyer (a hilarious Hannah Waddingham) rings Colt and offers him a job on a big-budget sci-fi epic shooting in Australia starring none other than Tom Ryder, he has no interest in returning to the game — until Gail informs him that Jody is directing the film in her feature debut. Down Under here we come!

Once Colt arrives on the location set for “Metalstorm,” which looks like a cross between “Dune” and “Mad Max,” he learns Jody is still furious with him for ghosting her. She takes it out on him by ordering repeated takes of a particularly painful stunt, all the while airing her grievances over a bullhorn. Winston Duke scores some laughs as a stunt coordinator who often quotes dialogue from action blockbusters, while Stephanie Hsu is terrific as Tom Ryder’s long-suffering personal assistant.

When Tom goes missing for reasons that defy logic, it’s an excuse for Colt to put his stunt man skills to work as he investigates, finds himself mixed up in all sorts of dangerous hijinks and is eventually framed for murder. If you spend even a nanosecond examining the particulars of the case and the developments that ensue, the whole structure falls apart — so it’s best to just sit back and marvel at the amazing stunt work

“The Fall Guy” is filled with self-referential, “meta” moments, whether it’s a scene where Colt enters a booth where his face can be scanned for use in perpetuity, or a sequence in which Jody and Colt are on the phone, discussing the possibility of Jody employing a split-screen technique in “Metalstorm,” and the conversation itself is rendered in … split-screen. Even the plot of “Metalstorm” is one big metaphor for the relationship between Colt and Jody. None of it this is particularly subtle, but it’s good fun, and it continues all the way through the closing credits, where we get to see the real-life stunt performers who did nomination-worthy work on the film.

If only the Academy had a category in which they could be nominated.

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‘Catching Fire’ Review: How the Stones’ Muse Rolled

Subtitled “The Story of Anita Pallenberg,” this documentary gives the life of the actress and model a thorough downer of a treatment.

By Ben Kenigsberg

If Anita Pallenberg was, in the words of her obituary in The New York Times in 2017 , “best known for her relationships with members of the Rolling Stones,” the documentary “Catching Fire,” directed by Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill, shifts the focus to Pallenberg herself: the model, actress and life force who embodied a certain image of ’60s freedom.

Made in collaboration with Pallenberg’s son Marlon Richards, “Catching Fire” is a redemptive portrait that nevertheless plays like a downer. Pallenberg’s story involves an unremitting cascade of drugs, addiction, volatile relationships and parenting tragedy, along with a 1979 incident in which a 17-year-old shot himself at her home , possibly playing Russian roulette. No excess is too excessive for this film, until it’s time to chronicle the later (and admittedly less sensational) period when Pallenberg calmed the turbulence surrounding her. To that, the doc devotes 10 minutes.

The narrative’s spine comes from an unpublished memoir by Pallenberg. Scarlett Johansson reads excerpts in voice-over. We hear of Pallenberg’s upbringing in wartime Europe (“I didn’t learn to walk — I ran”), her encounters with Andy Warhol and Allen Ginsberg, and her abandonment of modeling for psychedelics (“You couldn’t do both, and I loved acid”). While her relationship with the Stones’ Brian Jones fell apart, a result of his reputed drug use and physical abuse, she landed in the arms of Keith Richards, the Stone closest to her rock. We’re told that, as a child, Marlon was treated as the household’s adult.

There is plentiful — maybe too much — archival footage to illustrate all this. The film amasses an insightful array of talking heads, from Volker Schlöndorff, who directed Pallenberg in her film debut, to Theda Zawaiza, a former nanny for Marlon who describes Pallenberg at the time as being a virtual prisoner of a record company. Pallenberg is finally in focus. But the picture is tough to look at.

Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms .

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Bon Jovi docuseries 'Thank You, Goodnight' is an argument for respect

Eric Deggans

Jon Bon Jovi at the Mohegan Sun in Uncasville, Conn., in 2013. David Bergman/Hulu hide caption

Jon Bon Jovi at the Mohegan Sun in Uncasville, Conn., in 2013.

Hulu's docuseries Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story , spends a lot of time building up the Bon Jovi legend — exploring the band's almost unbelievable 40-plus-year run from playing hardscrabble rock clubs in New Jersey to earning platinum albums and entry into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

But what moved me most in the four-part series was something more revealing: its close look at the struggle by lead singer Jon Bon Jovi to overcome vocal problems which nearly led him to quit the band.

Footage of the singer croaking through vocal exercises, undergoing laser treatments, enduring acupuncture and finally turning to surgery is sprinkled throughout the series, which toggles back and forth between his problems in 2022 and a chronological story of the band's triumphs and tragedies from its earliest days.

Refusing to be Fat Elvis

Jon Bon Jovi was interviewed for Thank You, Goodnight . Disney/Hulu hide caption

Jon Bon Jovi was interviewed for Thank You, Goodnight .

Through it all, a question hangs: Will Bon Jovi ever recover enough vocal strength to lead a 40th anniversary tour?

"If I can't be the very best I can be, I'm out," he tells the cameras, still looking a bit boyish despite his voluminous gray hair at age 62. "I'm not here to drag down the legacy, I'm not here for the 'Where are they now?' tour ... I'm not ever gonna be the Fat Elvis ... That ain't happening."

Filmmaker Gotham Chopra — who has also directed docuseries about his father, spiritualist Deepak Chopra, and star quarterback Tom Brady — digs deeply into the band's history, aided by boatloads of pictures, video footage and early recordings provided by the group.

Former Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora in Thank You, Goodnight Disney/Hulu hide caption

Former Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora in Thank You, Goodnight

Chopra gets folks from the group's tight inner circle to speak up, including former manager Doc McGhee and guitarist Richie Sambora, who quit the band in 2013. ("Are we telling the truth, or are we going to lie, what are we going to do?" Sambora cracks to his offscreen interviewer. "Let's figure it out.")

But anyone expecting gossipy dish will walk away disappointed. Even major scandals in the band's history are handled with care, including the firing of founding bassist Alec John Such in 1994 (and the admission that his replacement, Hugh McDonald, already had been secretly playing bass parts on their albums for years), drummer Tico Torres' stint in addiction treatment and Sambora's decision to quit midway through a tour in 2013, with no notice to bandmates he had performed alongside for 30 years.

Alec John Such, a founding member of Bon Jovi, dies at 70

Sambora's explanation: When issues with substance use and family problems led him to miss recording sessions, Bon Jovi got producer John Shanks to play more guitar on their 2013 record What About Now . And Sambora was hurt.

"[Bon Jovi] had the whole thing kinda planned out," Sambora says, "which basically was telling me, um, 'I can do it without you.'"

Building a band on rock anthems

Jon Bon Jovi with guitarist Phil X. Disney/Hulu hide caption

Jon Bon Jovi with guitarist Phil X.

The docuseries shows how young New Jersey native John Bongiovi turned a job as a gofer at legendary recording studio The Power Station – owned by a cousin — into a recording of his first hit in the early 1980s, Runaway . His song eventually caught the ear of another little-known artist from New Jersey called Bruce Springsteen.

"The first demo I got of Jon's was a good song," says Springsteen, a longtime friend of Bon Jovi. "I mean, Jon's great talent is these big, powerful pop rock choruses that just demand to be sung by, you know, 20,000 people in an arena."

Music Interviews

Rock star jon bon jovi comes full 'circle'.

Thank You, Goodnight shows the band really took off by honing those rock anthems with songwriter Desmond Child, while simultaneously developing videos that showcased their status as a fun, rollicking live band. Hits like You Give Love a Bad Name, Livin' on a Prayer and Wanted: Dead or Alive made them MTV darlings and rock superstars.

Through it all, the singer and bandleader is shown as the group's visionary and spark plug, open about how strategically he pushed the band to write hit songs and positioned them for commercial success.

"It wasn't as though I woke up one morning and was the best singer in the school, or on the block, or in my house," he tells the camera, laughing. "I just had a desire and a work ethic that was always the driving force."

I saw that dynamic up close in the mid-1990s when I worked as a music critic in New Jersey, spending time with Jon Bon Jovi and the band. Back then, his mother ran the group's fan club and was always trying to convince the local rock critic to write about her superstar son – I was fascinated by how the band shrugged off criticisms of being uncool and survived changing musical trends, led by a frontman who worked hard to stay grounded.

Bon Jovi was always gracious and willing to talk; he even introduced me to then-New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman at one of his legendary Christmas charity concerts. (And in a crazy coincidence, the band's backup singer Everett Bradley is an old friend from college.)

I think the docuseries captures Bon Jovi's skill at leading the group through challenges musical and otherwise — from metal's slow fade off the pop charts to the rise of grunge rock — something the singer rarely gets credit for achieving.

Still, much of Thank You, Goodnight feels like an extended celebration of the band and its charismatic frontman, leavened by his earnest effort to regain control of his voice. If you're not a Bon Jovi fan, four episodes of this story may feel like a bit much (I'd recommend at least watching the first and last episodes.)

More than anything, the docuseries feels like an extended argument for something Bon Jovi has struggled to achieve, even amid million selling records and top-grossing concert tours – respect as a legendary rock band.

The audio and digital versions of this story were edited by Jennifer Vanasco .