"Slam"

In the movie “Slam” written by Saul Williams, a young Black man named Raymond Joshua is subjected to the oppressive prison industrial complex. He is growing up in urban America and has he struggles to survive in this world he resorts to selling weed. One night while he was buying marijuana, his counterpart is shot in the head. Ray gets caught by the police and told by his district attorney that he can plea guilty and get two or three years, or if he chooses to take the case to trial he will most likely get up to ten years for possession of a quarter pound of marijuana.

The significance of this first few moments of the movie is that it shows how our justice system is designed to fail. At the time of its creation, our justice system worked wonderfully. However over time, and with the incorporation of corporate America into our correctional facilities it has failed. Or has it? Perhaps this is exactly what our government wanted. Perhaps they needed to harness the slave labor of incarcerated persons in order to advance our economy and so they began to target our low socioeconomic status communities because they have the least power and therefore are the least likely to fight back. One of the core ideologies of this country is that money is power and perhaps our government has used this statement in the reverse intention in order to advance their own interests and goals of the elite.

“Slam” does a wonderful job laying out the paradox of why a poor black man growing up in a low socioeconomic area is 30% more likely to be incarcerated at some point in his life than the rest of the male population. These reasons themselves do not make sense however, that it is why it is important to explain them to the public and address these issues as well as ask questions. People do not often realize the system is like this and the general population often assumes that people in prison did something wrong and got caught. They don’t look further into why this is and that is why this movie is so good, because it raises many of these questions.