Essay Sample on 13th: America's Prisons are the New Plantations

The 13th documentary (film) starts by presenting troubling statistics about the high levels of racism that is the most basic knowledge for everyone (DuVernay, Averick, & Barish, 2016). The world's population in the United States is close to 5%, but 25% of these people are prisoners. The young African Americans in the country expect that one in three will be imprisoned at some point in their life. Prisons in the country have been identified as the new plantations that require free labour for effective management. However, the root cause of such happenings is money, where the cheap prison labour makes sure of the United States economy. Therefore, the system has designed a way through which more and more black people are put into jails. The constitutional amendments made intended at abolishing slavery practices in the country, but the human rights of prisoners on the same was not restricted. It was immediately after the changes that the population in these prisons grew explosively and continue to grow. The trend cannot be tied to sudden crime growth by an entrapped effort to disenfranchise the African American communities.

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Furthermore, the African American communities are changed in different sentences that separate the crack and powder cocaine. The number of criminal cases in plea bargaining has been on the rise in recent years due to the required minimum sentencing laws that increase the potential penalty of resulting in a trial. Therefore, an individual can face a double mandatory minimum sentence, but following that proceeds to trial, an individual is possibly sentenced to life imprisonment. For instance, a black teenager was imprisoned for close to three years for a crime he did not commit necessarily because he was not able to post bail after his arrest. The prosecution part of the amendment has resulted in prosecutorial leverage. It is evident from the three-strikes law that the criminal justice system is racial bias, especially to the African American men. The overrepresentation in the statistics of victimizations, arrests, executions, and incarceration. Mostly, more black men are arrested for drugs compared to their white counterparts. In most cases, this is as a result of investigating the inner-city neighborhoods where the dealings mainly happen. However, these investigations should be conducted majorly in the suburbs where these dealings occur behind closed doors.

Nonetheless, police brutality is noticeable, which occurred against the African Americans, including Trayvon Martin and others indicating the troubled prison complex. Also, this was a financially- motivated move that comprised corporations and the lawmakers of the land. There is institutionalized racism resulting in state violence and impunity between the minority groups and those enforcing the laws. The law enforcers were determined to taking back their street through an Act that allowed them to be more robust than they were where they used criminal laws. Therefore, no effort was allowed to grant African Americans the freedom they required to operate generally in society. In such a setting, it was then predictable that only the whites received the best part of their freedom and rights, allowing them access to home loans to build and settle in the suburbs and make sure that they had medical insurance covers for them and their children. The African Americans resided in the streets and the neighborhoods where they could barely afford to make complete payments. Besides, most of them were unemployed and, therefore, could not be availed home loans that could facilitate their stay in suburban areas.

Reference

DuVernay, A., Averick, S., & Barish, H. (2016). 13th [Documentary]. USA: Kandoo Films.