I can´t watch the documentary. Can you explain the gist of it?
The documentary is about how the 13rd Amendment detail that all men are free and can't be property except in case of commiting a crime is explored by corporations to get free labour or simply to make money from overincarceration.
The first part is about the setting, how from the end of slavery it came to prosecution, "The Birth of A Nation" and all that.
By the end of slavery the South started to exploring this. The economy had been previously based on free labour and it wasn't prepared to deal with the shift so suddenly, so it used prision workers. At the same time it started going about arresting people for as simple things as wandering around.
Then going over the dehumanization of black people, lynching and all that, to segregation and the civil rights movement and all the issues around that time.
The core of the documentary however starts with Nixon's policies and how he created ALEC. ALEC created a powerful lobby influence between coorporations and government (both federal and state) and is responsible for most laws regarding mass incarceration. At first it had companies like Coca-Cola and alike that ended up distancing due to the nasty things they were involved but among the few groups that stayed, there are the ones that own private prisions, benefit from prison labour, provide prisons food, etc.
ALEC basically redacts their own laws and give them to politicians to sign them. Some of the most damaging ones were signed by Clinton, but they been screwing things up since Nixon to the present day. Since black people were already a dehumanized community by many, it target it since early to increase prisioners.
It also rode on Nixon's war on drugs designed to hit particularly black people and hippies. It associated the black community with heroin and hippies with pot and cracked on that night after night.
ALEC is responsible for police overfunding and police having to deal with tasks that should be relayed on other professionals, voter suppression, prosecution overpowering (like creating minimal mandatory penalties, taking that power away from judges), increase in penality severities, etc.