What if I told you that the United States has spent $1 trillion over a 40-year period destroying 45 million families? What would you do?
That’s the question acclaimed filmmaker Eugene Jarecki struggles with in his latest documentary The House I Live In, which takes a closer look at the 40-year War on Drugs and the money machine that is the prison industrial complex in the United States.
The film doesn’t just focus on the people who have been incarcerated from an unjust system, but everyone from the local street dealer to narcotics cops, from federal judges who hand out 20-year mandatory sentences like candy, to the millions of families affected.
Above: Director Eugene Jarecki
The heart of the film also shines a light on the human rights implications of U.S. drug policy, and how even though the United States has spent $1 trillion on the “War on Drugs” they have nothing to show for it, other than destroyed families, overpopulated prisons and a thriving drug industry that continues to rake in billions of dollars annually.
I had a chance to watch the film with Jarecki, which followed a short Q&A, and he said one of the most important things to take away from the film is that the negativity of the War on Drugs was forgotten for a long time, but now can become a national conversation once again.
One story Jarecki told was when he visited the Oklahoma State Reformatory in Granite, Oklahoma, one of the toughest prisons in the state, and told inmates how the system viewed them and how it was important for them to not fight and kill each other – but focus efforts towards the system.
Here’s what Jarecki told us about the inmates at Granite:
“I noticed that all the inmates were sitting by race, the Black guys are all together, the Chicano guys are all together, the White guys, the Native guys and so forth.
And I said to them, you all think you are sitting in sections by race and that’s the picture of your lives, like you’re a pen of sheep and pen of goats, you are not.
Your enemy, your common enemy is the sheperd who put you in these pens. And the sheperd is not a person or a group of people, it’s a system and regime of laws that have woefully lost their way.
And so long as you guys feel divided by race you play directly into what the system wants…and as soon as you understand that, your unity in here will become a force for your on betterment.”
One of the most poignant aspects of the film is that the prison industrial complex has become a trillion dollar business over the last 40 years without a product.
Not to mention how the history of the drug war, for a long period of time, has singlehandedly segregated black Americans with the advent of the crack era.
Think about this: there are more poor blacks under correctional rule, whether it be jail, prison, parole or probation, than were enslaved in 1850, 10 years before the Civil War began.
And that’s what the film brilliantly points out, that at its start, the powers that be had to find an enemy to wage their wage against.
Above: Maurice Haltiwanger, now serving a 20-year sentence for 50 grams of crack cocaine.
America has an unbelievable dedication to incarceration as a nation; we are the world’s largest jailers as compared to other developed nations.
It is a monetary profiting system that has been raking in the dough for over four decades. It’s an industry that services the wealthy and people in power.
David Simon, the creator of HBO’s The Wire, boiled it down simply, saying the Drug War is a Holocaust in slow motion.
The House I Live In is in theaters in selected cities and if you would like more information on the film, visit thehouseilivein.org, follow them on Twitter @Drugwarmovie and check them out on Facebook @DrugWarMovie.
