Don't do the crime

Seems like common sense.

There wouldn't be so many blacks in jail if they weren't commiting so much crime.

This documentary isn't saying crime shouldn't be punished but that laws are made up specifically to target black people disproportionately. That these laws come from the same historical context that allowed slavery, Jim Crow, segregation and now mass incarceration.

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Amazing how someone (Ref to first 2 posters) can come on with an opinion and obviously didn't watch, pay attention or understand the film...just amazing.
Maybe stick to cartoons in the future.

As a white girl that grew up in Detroit, let me try to paint a hypothetical picture for you.

Imagine if the government , local, state or federal created punishments for crimes that put white people in prison at a higher rate. For example, white Americans break hunting laws at an alarming rate in America., these can include anything from hunting at the wrong time to hunting without a proper license. After some of these crimes are discovered it is also discovered that some hunters are breaking more serious crimes, like being under the influence or possession of drugs, alcohol or even hunting with illegal weapons. What if they decided, that you would get a 1 year mandatory sentence after breaking hunting laws three times because they are trying to stop the small percentage of hunters breaking serious crimes? That would put an unfairly high amount of white people in jail because guess what, White people are "doing the crime", technically.

Now for Reality,

I can tell you for a fact that there's more white people involved with the sale and possssion of illegal drugs in this country, than black, Hispanic and Asian people. But it's awfully funny that most of the black people that are in jail are there because of drugs. white people are in fact " doing the crime more often", but aren't doing the time because they aren't even picked up. In Detroit, one of the biggest crack and meth rings were dealing untouched because it was developed in the suburbs where police don't even show up unless they are called. Meanwhile, black people were being arrested and jailed in inner city Detroit just for loitering because of a crackdown on arson. You couldn't be black and walk down your freaking street without being arrested because you could "potentially" be an arsonist. I had a good friend that was in jail for 3 months because he couldn't afford bail. They released him because it was ,in their words, "a mistake". They took 3 months of his life away because of a mistake. A mistake based on a crime of arson, while white people are selling pills and meth rall over town and don't even get me started on the prostitution and human trafficking that white people are controlling in this city and state.

I implore you to give your opinions some real thought. What the doc is trying to explain is the way in which African Americans have been continually pushed to the margins of society and a number of tactics used to do this, these tactics becoming increasingly "subtle" as the world moves forward. We have moved from lynching, to segregation, to the war on drugs. When an entire race is pushed to the margin of society and continually put down, beaten up, SHOT by police, it creates a cycle. A vicious, poisonous cycle. The term that is often used is systematic racism; a racism that runs so thick and so deep in the veins of the country that it becomes part of every day life. Please, I implore you, try to do some research and try to put yourself in someone else's shoes.

Clearly you lack education if you think prison sentences are about "doing the the time if you do the crime." Perhaps a little trip to the library will help you be a bit more educated and a little less ignorant.

it's clear you came away from the documentary with a very rudimentary and close minded interpretation. "13th" covers how the abolishment of slavery never was truly abolished and has been reworked into a system designed to keep minority in poverty. a system designed for people with less opportunities to fail and be punished disproportionately...

Yeah, 'cause it is that simple. Oh, who could have known that you ought to have been breaking the law to be shot. Pfft, this guy.