13th Page #10

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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?

USA! USA!

USA! USA! USA! USA!

F*** you! F*** you!

F*** you! F*** you!

Don't you dare do that!

Don't you dare do that!

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.

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.

In the good old days,

they'd rip him out of that seat so fast...

- Shut up. Shut the hell up.

- No, f*** no.

No, I will not shut the hell up.

Why are you even here?

Get the f*** out of here, man.

Get out of here.

- Be respectful!

- I care about my son's future!

In the good old days...

law enforcement

acted a lot quicker than this.

A lot quicker.

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