Without the devastating ramifications of mass incarceration, Donald Trump never would have been elected president of the United States. That’s an argument that Van Jones, CNN host of The Messy Truth, nimbly makes in an interview with Vanity Fair.

He quickly deconstructs how the country’s current prison system—a topic explored in the Oscar-nominated Netflix documentary 13th—disadvantages the black community, which consistently supports Democratic candidates at staggeringly high rates. Florida’s 2016 turnout is one example: it’s a state where “hundreds of thousands of African-Americans [are] permanently barred from voting because they’re convicted felons,” Jones says. If former inmates were able to get voting rights restored, Florida “would be a blue state every time.”

Jones is passionate about this issue. He’s currently involved in the Dream Corps campaign #cut50, which aims to reduce the prison population by half. Jones was also one of the many people interviewed in the Ava DuVernay–directed documentary 13th, currently nominated for a best documentary Oscar. The film explores the history of mass incarceration in the United States and its deep connection to institutional racism, persuasively making the case for an overhaul of the current system. The amount of interest in the film has also led Netflix to grant public screening access to elementary schools, universities, community groups and more.

“It’s devastating and important,” Jones says of the film, which also features interviews with figures like Angela Davis and Cory Booker. “There are very few things that you see or read that you literally wish were mandatory viewing for the country.”

Though people might walk away from the film with different conclusions, Jones feels that it can teach “some people who are not close to the black community [to] at least understand why there are protests called Black Lives Matter, at least understand why there are so many African-Americans in prison.”

The statistics are shocking. Black men make up about 6.5 percent of the U.S. population, but 40.2 percent of the prison population consists of black men. They’re imprisoned at much higher rates than white men, even if they commit similar crimes. Latino men and black women also face disproportionately high imprisonment rates. As 13th argues, this is the result of years of racially charged legislation that effectively strips people of their rights once they’ve been through the system.