Name: Julian Martos

Social Justice Group: War and Violence: How race affects conviction rates in NYC (B)

Date of Fieldwork: January 27, 2025

Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):13th Documentary by Ava Duvernay

What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork:

For our fieldwork, we watched the documentary 13th, which is an eye-opening documentary created by Ava Duvernay that shows the timeline of racism in the justice system and the real world. This shows how long racism has changed forms and found loopholes in the law.

One way that racism has found loopholes is by the war on drugs. In the documentary, we learned many things about the Nixon campaign, and the major thing was how the war on drugs was set up. During Nixon’s election, the war on drugs was fought as a criminal issue, not a health issue. This increased the number of incarceration rates and led people who smoked marijuana to be sent to jail. Because of this, federal spending for local law also increased to almost double the amount because of the mass incarceration. This led to hundreds of thousands of people being sent to jail, and the majority of them were African Americans. Later, the Nixon administration officials admitted that the war on drugs was to get African Americans in jail.

Another way that racism has affected families is with Reagan as president. Reagan’s campaign group made many ads and newsletters that criminalized black families and children of color. During his term, many media depicted black people as evil, which led to more arrests and fear of them. This led to more racism and unjust sentencing.