So tonight Jon's got Eugene Jarecki, talking about his second Sundance Grand Jury Prize documentary win, The House I Live In (the drug war/prison-industrial-complex movie). Lots of stuff online -- especially about that night that Brad Pitt talked at a screening -- much of which is repetitive or really, really basic (not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that. Got to start somewhere, right? We haven't all spent decades embedded in ultra-leftyism, after all.) Anyway, RottenTomatoes (92%) and MetaCritic (74/100) have reviews, and here are some snippets I came across:
In the documentary The House I Live In, filmmaker Eugene Jarecki caputres the emotional, societal, and human repercussions of the four-decade failed war on drugs. The film follows the consequences of the drug war into people’s homes, and provides faces and imagery for harrowing statistics: The U.S. holds 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, including 500,000 Americans convicted for nonviolent drug offenses. Meanwhile, drug police enforcement has marginalized hundreds of thousands of Americans, while drug use has remained virtually the same since President Nixon formally launched the war.
Jarecki’s film puts faces and stories to a drug war that has affected all corners of the criminal justice system and has disproportionately hurt poor black communities. The many chapters of contraband laws, Jarecki commented to ThinkProgress and chronicles in his film, “act as a thinly veiled force for racial and social control.” One surprising aspect of The House I Live In is how far the disappointment and frustration reaches, from inmates and their families and friends, to dispirited police officers, prison guards, and judges. We spoke with Jarecki about The House I Live In, which won the grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and is now playing in theaters.
intro to thinkprogress interview
Movie review: 'The House I Live In' calls for cease-fire in war on drugs
Eugene Jarecki's documentary paints a disturbing picture of the heartbreaking toll that the U.S. stance of punitive moralism has taken on the country and its poorest citizens.
Politically engaged filmmaking is nothing new for Eugene Jarecki, who has grappled with weighty themes in documentaries that include "The Trials of Henry Kissinger" and "Why We Fight." With "The House I Live In," a cogent look at America's failed war on drugs, his work reaches new depth and urgency.
It's a film as profoundly sad as it is enraging and potentially galvanizing, and it's one of the most important pieces of nonfiction to hit the screen in years.
Jarecki lays out a clear and compelling case demonstrating that U.S. policy against mind-altering substances and, more to the point, the people who use or sell them, amounts to a systematic scourge upon those with the least resources in this country — a war based on class and race...
LATimes
THR: When did the war start?
Jarecki: It was declared by Richard Nixon in 1971 and 40 years and 44 million arrests later we've lost over a trillion dollars, and yet drugs are more available than ever before, sold by younger and younger kids, the purity level is higher. So none of the stated goals of that war have been achieved and yet it continues to grow. More and more American communities get swept up into the prison-industrial vortex, so that small towns everywhere now are deeply reliant on the life-blood of money and jobs that hosting a prison promises. America has become the world's largest jailer with 2.3 million people behind bars, a larger percentage of our population than any other country, except perhaps Korea.
THR: How many would we have if we didn't incarcerate drug offenders?
Jarecki: Between a quarter and a third of those in jail right now are in there for drug crimes.
THR: Who did you interview?
Jarecki: Dealers, family members of dealers and drug crime victims, wardens, cops, lawyers, judges, senators, and activistsin about 25 states. Drug laws go back to the 1800s. The people being put away in the 1860s were Chinese opium users and yet the number one users of opium in America at that time were middle-aged white women. This was followed by the persecution of blacks for cocaine in the early 1900s, and the persecution of Mexican migrant laborers for marijuana. So we have always had drug laws that were very much race-driven.
THR: What changed with Nixon in 1971?
Jarecki: What had been a rag-tag history of somewhat racist lawmaking got codified into the formal enterprise of a war, with the profiteering, political engineering, entrenched interest, corruption, self-perpetuation, and the failure of reason, because once you declare a war the only way you can end it is by declaring victory or defeat. Prior to declaring it a war it wouldn't have been that hard to retreat from inappropriate drug laws. But Nixon spent two-thirds of his drug budget on treatment and only a third on law enforcement.
THR: What are we spending now?
Jarecki: We spend much more on law enforcement and a tiny fraction on treatment. Nixon’s impact was actually better than a lot of his successors. You can lay at the feet of Reagan and Clinton the real ramping up of this drug war. He planted the seeds and they watered them into tremendous blossoming.
HollywoodReporter.com Q&A
Prison and Poverty for All: The Future We Live In
...Jarecki constructs the documentary around the life of his childhood nanny, whose family has struggled with drugs. He is curious about the racial bias of her misfortune—she is black, he is not—and in exploration he finds that “whatever damage drugs do to people has been made far worse by the laws America has enacted to stop drugs.”
This is because war is the wrong metaphor for what is ultimately a health, economic and social crisis. The ghetto, as depicted in the film, is a farm for police to harvest human overtime slips. As is well captured on “The Wire,” the system makes sport of the downtrodden wretches caught engaging in the only economic activity available to them. Judges, forced by shortsighted laws to pronounce sentences that are, at a minimum, draconian, wrestle with their guilt. Even the prison guard, who acknowledges that his town’s survival is dependent on the system, condemns it.
Missing from all this is the literal war—the often bloody fight funded by the United States to take place elsewhere in the world...
...But “The House I Live In” is well served by its limitations. It would take a Ken Burns epic to chronicle every facet of the war on drugs. Instead, Jarecki returns again and again to the rot at the core of the war: our inhumanity to one another. Whether we’re boxing the less fortunate into ghettos or prisons, some social defect allows us to look away.
Ultimately it’s the guards and cops and judges—who are prevented by their occupations from turning a blind eye—who make the best witnesses in Jarecki’s film. For the rest of us, it’s too easy to not notice that we house one-quarter of the world’s prison population.
Much of “The House I Live In” feels like a story I’ve already read, but there are moments of genius that are riveting. The editing as much as the direction is to be thanked for those graceful scenes that tie together a sprawling, meandering epic of a documentary. Jarecki’s fairness is deliberate and maybe even a bit self-conscious, but it helps when the audience is asked to think of popular anti-drug programs as a system designed to, as Simon bluntly puts it, “kill the poor.”
truthdig.com
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