Eugene Jarecki’s new film The House I live in, which is currently available for purchase streaming from Amazon and iTunes, opens with a press conference featuring Richard Nixon. Flanked by his assistants, Nixon declares war on the “Number One enemy of the American people”: Drugs.
The remainder of the movie is a sober examination of the colossal failure of the war on drugs. It documents this war through the personal histories of addicts, sellers, police officers, activists, prison guards, and others whose lives are woven into the tapestry of overenforcement and mass incarceration.
Much to my relief, the movie does not minimize the immense harm that drugs bring upon users, their families, and their communities. It acknowledges the devastation of addiction, as well as the fact that many (albeit not all) drug dealers sell to finance their own habits. It also is sensitive to the sociological nuances of drug use. The movie treats the crack epidemic of the 1980s, as well as the subsequent onslaught of meth on the American heartland, with care, acknowledging the seriousness of the problem but avoiding moralistic panic. And yet, as David Simon says on the film, to acknowledge the devastation of drugs is not to automatically condone what has been done to combat that devastation. The immense expense and effort, and the dehumanizing effects of the war on drugs itself, have not led to a decrease in drug abuse, and can be deemed a failure.
One of the movie’s great strengths is the finesse with which it treats the relationship between the drug war and racial strife. Particularly attuned to the plight of inner-city African American communities, the movie tells the history of drug criminalization as one of racially-motivated policies. While the movie focuses on the black community as a target (and Michelle Alexander, also interviewed, discusses this aspect of the war, as well as David Kennedy from Harvard,) the movie also includes fascinating footage of the opium wars and of enforcement along the Mexican border. And yet, as it moves to tell the story of poor white meth users, the movie also says that the story of the failed drug war transcends race.
Through David Simon’s interview, and fascinating filming of stop-and-frisk scenes, the movie ties up the connection between mass incarceration and street policing. The pay structure for cops is problematized; while brainwork and legwork involved in solving a murder or apprehending a rapist produces, perhaps, one arrest, routine stop-and-frisk activities and warehousing nonviolent drug dealers results in more arrests and in better pay. Another economic angle is the correctional industry; footage from a correctional conference in Tampa shows jocular prison officials trying out tasers and other equipment fueled by an industry of incarceration.
Those of us who have been following mass incarceration for a while will not find much new or shocking information in the movie, but it is a great introduction to mass incarceration in the United States for the many people whose taxes pay for this failed war and who might be unaware of its destructive implications.
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