Film For Thought Screening of “13th”

Named after the 13th constitutional amendment, which abolished slavery except as “punishment for crime,” the movie uses archival footage and expert commentary to make the case that slavery hasn’t disappeared from the U.S.—it’s evolved into our modern system of mass incarceration, one in which many prisons are run by for-profit companies and prisoners can be paid a pittance to work for corporations.

The movie interviews noted legal professionals and historians like Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, Brian Stevenson, author of Just Mercy , Henry Louis Gates Jr. plus many more.

The film charts the explosive growth in America’s prison population; in 1970, there were about 200,000 prisoners; today, the prison population is more than 2 million. Although the U.S. has just 5% of the world’s population, it has about 25% of the world’s prisoners, and about one in three prisoners are black men. More than 60% of the people in U.S prisons are people of color.

The documentary touches on chattel slavery; D. W. Griffith’s film “The Birth of a Nation”; Emmett Till; the civil rights movement; the Civil Rights Act of 1964; Richard M. Nixon; and Ronald Reagan’s declaration of the war on drugs and much more.  A representative from the Southern Delaware Alliance for Racial Justice will be on hand to facilitate discussion after the screening of the film.