The power of and the problems with the Netflix doc 13th

The Netflix documentary 13th, an examination of the unforeseen consequences of the 13th amendment, which abolished slavery except as servitude for punishment for a crime. The argues, and the filmmakers document the argument in detail, that the South needed slave labor after the Civil War so they created draconian laws that enabled long prison terms for crimes such as "loitering," which brought blacks back into involuntary servitude via the prison system. This led to the image of all blacks as dangerous criminals, particularly threatening, first, to white women of the South and, generations later, threatening to life and property and civic order. We follow the treatment of black prisoners from the lynch mobs and the rise of the Klan to law-and-order candidates for office such as Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. (remember Willie Horton?), and Trump - leading us to the current state in which 1 of 3 black men is likely to spend part of his life in prison. The 2nd half of the film documents how the prison industry needs a steady supply of prisoners to meet its profit goals - and how prisoners work for free for many major corporations, whose best interests are also served by building up incarceration levels. All this is appalling and frighteningly true on both levels: the psychological fear mongering that stirs up white masses and the cold economics, America driving toward short-term profit and cheap or free labor. It's a powerful and necessary message though, unfortunately, unlike other recent polemical documentaries such as An Inconvenient Truth, the filmmakers offer no obvious solutions. On the plus side, the filmmakers have a tremendous archive of news and film footage and stills going back a century or more and they have a huge # of top-line experts and analysts contributing their views: Henry Louis Gates, Angela Davis, Corey Booker, Newt Gingrich (surprisingly progressive on this issue), and many more. On the downside, the entire film is archive footage and talking heads - there's no real documentary footage, nothing within a prison, no interviews w/ prisoners or the unjustly accused, all of which would have made 13th more powerful emotionally and viscerally - as it is, it's well meaning and persuasive but a little dry.