BEFORE: By the time I'm done with Documentary Month, I'll be very close to the next hundred mark, Movie 3,300, and also very close to reviewing "Spider-Man: Far From Home". I may SEE it before then, but there's definitely a slot waiting for posting in just about a month. The great thing about a documentary chain is that the movies tend to be a little bit shorter, and so I've got a little extra free time - I may have time to sneak out to see "Dark Phoenix" and "Toy Story 4" soon, but again, I'm going to sit on those reviews until I can properly link to them. Cheating, I know, but that's what it takes to maybe have a "perfectly linked year". The way things are going, with "Avengers: Endgame" coming back into theaters, I'm afraid they're going to pull "Dark Phoenix" before I get a chance to see it, then I won't be able to link the way I want in October. Carpe diem and all that.
Tonight the topic is systemic racism, and before long I'll be on to politics and capitalism and global warming - thankfully I'm saving some documentaries about comedians for the end of the doc chain, which is smart because after all these downer political films, I'll probably need a good laugh.
Walter Cronkite carries over again from "Tower", and I'll follow a new link tomorrow, I promise.
THE PLOT: An in-depth look at the prison system in the United States and how it reveals the nation's history of racial inequality.
AFTER: It's the first day of summer, and looking back on the week it seems I accidentally programmed a bunch of films that took place (more or less) during the summer, and south of the Mason-Dixon line. July 20, 1969 in Houston, TX and Cape Canaveral, FL (where the rocket exhaust made things EXTRA hot, I'll bet...) August 1, 1966 in Austin, TX, on a day when the pavement was close to burning the legs of the shooting victims... Even the Watergate scandal broke on June 18 or 19, and Washington DC is surrounded by Maryland and Virginia, so that counts as the South, I think. So let's wrap things up with another film that starts in the U.S. South - the hot, sticky, sweaty and racist South. Happy summer, everyone!
Now, how do we statistically explain that the United States has only 5% of the world's population, but we also have 25% of the world's prison inmates? This film has one answer, again and again: racism. There certainly might be something there, especially since one of every 3 African-American males in the U.S. will spend time in prison, when for white men it's only about one of every 17 males. I'll concede that point, but I think statistically there are a couple other factors involved here. Why do other countries have fewer prison inmates? I think there are many reasons - in some of the Third World countries, it may because crime is less enforceable or prosecuted less. The United States is a very litigious society by comparison to others, and as all of our candidates run on these "law and order" platforms, eventually the public demands that there be something akin to law and order, and that means putting people in jail. Also, there may be fewer prison inmates in other countries because they're more likely to put criminals to death, by methods like stoning and beheadings. (Yep, I'm talking about you, MIDDLE EAST). Then, on the other side of the spectrum, you've got European countries like the Netherlands that don't consider drug use a crime, for example - so therefore, fewer people arrested for smoking pot and hash means fewer people in prison. Lately our country has sort of been heading in this direction, with pot legal in some states, so I wonder if the stats are going to start turning around.
That's right, when Nixon came up with the idea of the "war on drugs", and then Reagan actually put those proposals into place, nobody really thought about the long-term consequences (or...did they?). Like, where are we going to PUT all these new criminals, and are these new laws going to be applied fairly across the board, racially. Ha ha, of course not. This documentary takes things a step further, claiming that the War on Drugs, plus other innovations like the "Three Strikes" law, were specifically tailored to put brown people in prison, and keep them there. Then corporations not-so-coincidentally owned by white people would be the ones hired to build all the new prisons, and also benefit from the free labor that could be obtained by putting inmates to work. Thus continuing the long-standing practice of light-skinned people profiting from the suffering of darker-skinned people, it's practically an American tradition - however, essentially it's also slavery in a different form. Did you think we fixed slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation (which only freed slaves in some states, BTW) and the 13th Amendment? Oh, you're so naive.
And it gets worse - the income disparity between white Americans and black Americans means that it's much easier for arrested white men to make bail, so that means often black people are forced to stay in prison while awaiting trial, because they can't afford to get out. And then once you create a wave of new arrested people, via a program like "Three Strikes", there's not enough time for every arrested person to have a complete fair trial (a process guaranteed by the Constitution) so the vast majority of accused people are offered plea deals, and only a small percentage of cases go to trial. For an arrested person, guilty or innocent, especially one who can't afford to be bailed out, it probably seems like a better deal to plead guilty and serve, say, two or three years, instead of waiting in jail for a trial that could result in a sentence of, say, ten or twenty years.
So follow the track of a black man wrongfully arrested, innocent of a crime (let's say, it could happen, it's happened before...) and he can't afford to make bail, so he's forced to stay in jail even though he hasn't been convicted of anything yet. Anything could happen to him in prison while waiting to stand trial, he could be injured or killed or made somebody's bitch, when he shouldn't even be there in the first place. So to hurry things along, and start the countdown which will eventually get him out, he admits to a lesser crime he didn't do, avoiding the possibility of a lengthy trial and a much longer prison term. He serves his two or three years, and he gets out, only now he can't get a job, and to top things off, he can't vote either. Now multiply this times a few thousand cases, and you can see how the system could produce an entire generation of disenfranchised people, who conveniently also have no political power to change the system. Even a James Bond villain wouldn't come up with something this cruel, across the board.
Naturally, this system started down South, right after the Civil War - somebody should have reminded the Southerners that they LOST - when nearly everything that black people could do was made illegal by these little local laws, so there were dozens of reasons to arrest a black man for walking down the street, maybe he just looked at a white woman wrong, or maybe he just passed a cop on the wrong day. Those who couldn't pay their fines then had to work off their "crimes", so that's free labor, voter suppression and being made to feel like a second-class citizen, all in one big ball of racism.
And Democrats can't say they weren't part of the problem - it's Southern Democrats who passed the Jim Crow laws, and then after the civil rights legislation in the 1960's, when Republicans like Reagan succeeded with their "Law & Order" mandates like the War or Drugs and the War on Crime, Democratic candidates like Bill Clinton only succeeded by claiming they would be tough on crime, too. And some of his legislation proposals also came from ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) which had been supplying Republicans for years with legislation that would feed the U.S. prison-industrial complex. The crime rates in the United States have been declining since the late 20th Century (and that's not "fake news"), so why is the rate of incarceration UP?
Why have both political parties taken the same tactic, to demonize minorities and claim they'll be "tougher on crime" than the other guy? Why is the public more likely to fearfully cast their votes for the "law & order" candidates, rather than the ones who say they'll work for prison reform? Why don't you ever hear about any young white people killed by cops after routine traffic stops? It's fear as a factor, across the board. And if we keep voting out of fear, that's just going to keep justifying those tactics, and the next bunch of candidates will try even harder to make us afraid, because that shit's been proven to work. We've sort of moved on to "crimmigrants" with Trump in charge, but the principles are the same - without a caravan of brown people coming our way to cross over the border, and do God knows what, how are they going to scare people into supporting their racist policies?
I'm not really sold on all of the claims this documentary makes (look, I'm guessing at least SOME of the people in jail should probably be there...) but I'm still pretty disgusted with American politics tonight.
Since it's documentary month, I'm going to start checking Wikipedia for important dates in U.S. history, you never know, I could hit on something relevant. For example, it's not just the summer solstice today, it's also World Humanist Day. Humanism (so I've just learned) is a philosophical and ethical stance that emphasizes the value, individually and collectively, of human beings, and favors critical thinking and evidence over dogma and superstition. Sounds good to me. Also, on this day in 1915, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling in Guinn v. United States, which struck down Oklahoma's "grandfather clause" legislation that was effectively denying the right to vote to African-Americans. Also on this date in 1964, three (white) civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi by members of the Ku Klux Klan - remember the film "Mississippi Burning"? Yep, more hot summer Southern racist activity.
Also starring Michelle Alexander, Cory Booker, Malkia Cyril, Angela Davis, David Dinkins, Henry Louis Gates, Kevin Gannon, Newt Gingrich, Cory Greene, John Hagan, Van Jones, David Keene, Grover Norquist, Rick Perry, Charles Rangel, Bryan Stevenson, with archive footage of George H.W. Bush (last seen in "The Polka King"), George W. Bush (last seen in "Molly's Game"), Jimmy Carter (last seen in "20th Century Women"), Gerald Ford (ditto), Ronald Reagan (ditto), Bill Clinton (last seen in "Quincy"), Hillary Clinton (last seen in "Vice"), Nancy Reagan (ditto), Bob Dole, Ed Koch, Lyndon Johnson (last seen in "Apollo 11"), Richard Nixon (ditto), Barack Obama (last seen in "I Am Big Bird: The Carroll Spinney Story"), Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump (last seen in "Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama Bin Laden"), Martin Luther King Jr. (last seen in "The Doors: When You're Strange"), Malcolm X (last seen in "Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown"), Lee Atwater, Peter Jennings (last seen in "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey"), Tom Brokaw (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Dan Rather (last seen in "Fair Game"), Harry Reasoner (last seen in "Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House"), Rachel Maddow, Stephen Colbert (also last seen in "Quincy"), John Oliver, Larry Wilmore.
RATING: 5 out of 10 chain gangs
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