Many have seen television series “Making a Murderer” as well as other crime-based documentaries on Netflix, but there’s one that everyone needs to consider watching: Ava DuVernay’s “13th.” DuVernay's film shows how slavery, yes slavery, exists to a certain degree in these United States of America. It also demonstrates how a 13th Amendment loophole regarding slavery in the Constitution is and was taken advantage of by people in power. As a result, the amendment helped to negatively affected the poor of America as it allowed for them to be removed from society and placed in prisons with lengthy terms for most minor of crimes.

Viewers have to first understand the provisions of the 13th Amendment. Section 1 of the 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution states, “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.” This amendment ended the pre-Civil War slavery we commonly think about. However, the “as a punishment of crime” clause, a lesser-known provision of the amendment, creates an exception. And many have taken advantage of this loophole since the 19th century.

Here’s how it works: after the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865, black Americans in the South were arrested on a massive scale for petty crimes, such as loitering. This was all in an effort to prevent the collapse of the South’s primarily agricultural-based economy. In prison, they were subject, against their will, to lengthy sentences of hard labor without pay which, simply put, looks like the making of slavery. However, no case could be made against these lengthy sentences as they had committed, albeit small, crimes.

Fast forward past the days of segregation to the 1990s. Bill Clinton is president, and he proposes his infamous 1994 Crime Bill, where countless poor families, mostly those of black Americans, are torn apart as hundreds of thousands serve lengthy prison sentences for nonviolent drug offences. With this massive increase in inmate population, corporations began to look at ways to make a quick buck. Because there were more prisoners, there was a greater demand for prisons. Thus, corporations banded together, funded and created privatized prisons, going on to sign contracts with the government to house inmates. These inmates would be put to work manufacturing products for worldwide brands such as Boeing and JC Penney among others.

Today, groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, composed of multi-billion dollar corporations, draft and lobby for the passage of laws to ensure a steady supply of prisoners. One such law is the controversial Stop and Frisk law in New York City, which allows for local police to stop, interrogate, and frisk primarily poorer minorities.

Now, before you say that these prisoners who are exploited for their labor deserve what they get, try putting yourself in their shoes. Life in a privatized prison is grim. One day, you’re caught doing something you aren’t supposed to do, and you’re sent to a privatized prison. Here, you’re forced to work long hours making a product that you receive little to no compensation for. On top of that, the food that you eat is terrible because the food supplier that holds that government contract has already banked hundreds of millions of dollars and now doesn’t care about the quality of your food. In some privatized prisons, maggots are even found in the food. Even your health services are sometimes denied because that respective servicer doesn’t want to take care of costs. And all of this exploitation possibly originates from a stupid mistake you made years ago.

Political commentator Van Jones is one of the more interesting parts of the documentary. His stance on privatized prisons is that they can affect anyone regardless of race. “You cannot put a price tag on wasted genius… we do not know how many inventions, cures and great works of art are unavailable to humanity because the people that could have created them are locked up for dumb stuff that most people did in college." Other notable testimonies DuVernay uses in her film come from activist Angela Jones, Harvard University professor Henry Gates, and former U.S. Representative Newt Gingrich.

This film also does an exceptional job at presenting disparities between race. For the same exact crimes, black Americans are more likely to be sentenced as well as have harsher sentences than white Americans, which any person with common sense would find unjust. Also, it was not until recently that the mandatory sentence for possession of crack cocaine was some 100 times longer than for the same amount of its far more expensive counterpart: powdered cocaine. This statistic surprised me. Could such laws be described as “discriminatory” in a sense, and if so, is mass incarceration really and truly beneficial to American society as a whole?

At the end of the day, this film is one of the most informative documentaries that I’ve ever watched, and it raises interesting questions about the 13th Amendment’s loophole that corporations have recently exploited for monetary gain.

This film also influenced many of my personal beliefs. For example, instead of criminalizing minor drug offences, we should try to treat these offences instead as health issues. Also, of course, I would now agree that we need to start finding ways to decrease America’s proportionally large inmate population. Sending more and more people to prisons for small crimes is not the way to achieve such a goal.

All in all, I would say that this documentary is really well-produced. Admittedly though, I would have liked to see more than just one testimony from an inmate of a privatized prison as it would have helped to better convey the sentiment the producers might have tried to convey to a viewer. This being said, I would give this documentary a respectable 4/5.