Can you sort of bring in some of the other elements of people in America at the time that our justice system work was created and how they were left out and not thought about?

Yes, absolutely.

So I'll first talk about women.

These systems were built for men, but there always were women in there because there were women who broke the law and got stuck.

Eastern State Penitentiary had women from the beginning.

Very few, but they were in there, which I think we just never really hear about that.

And in some of the other early prisons that we know about, there would be maybe...

Yeah.

Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah.

So this is one of the many threads that Lucas is talking about that we tried to pull through, which is that the system of justice has been used to maintain the social order in different ways in different parts of the country.

And in the states that form the Confederacy that went through the Civil War and then Reconstruction and then the end of Reconstruction and the imposition of Jim Crow segregation.

which meant disenfranchisement of all black people and putting them in a second class status throughout the south the justice system was part of that and what that meant was that there were laws made that if you were convicted of a crime you could be incarcerated but then you could be leased out to a private company that could take you out of the prison and bring you to wherever they needed work done building a railroad um digging for coal, clearing forests and swamps, just any manual labor in horrendous circumstances.

And so tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Black, mostly men, some women and children, went through this system that was called the convict lease system.

And there are companies that made enormous fortunes or individuals well-connected politically, well-connected people who made enormous fortunes exploiting their labor.

I will say what I found to be maybe one of the most powerful parts of the film were the thoughts of those people who have been incarcerated, either from writings or from those interviews you did with people who've had that experience who talk about universally about how dehumanizing the experience is.