It is pointless to speak to the system when all know it is wrong. Wehave a body of people paid to administer a body of legislation thatis clearly wrong and no one is able to stop. We have a war machinewith no path to victory using present tools but still manning thetrenches. It no longer can even muster a fair vote to maintain thestatus quo.
Yet no one is able to disengage.
It must be shut down in order to restore the health of out society.
Yet we all seem to be wasting our breath and the real slave master isthe secure government job that depends on all this. How banal can wemake the war on drugs?
The People Vs. theWar on Drugs: Filmmaker Tackles the "Predatory Monster"
Tuesday, 13 November2012 09:12By Maya Schenwar,
http://truth-out.org/news/item/12707-the-people-vs-the-war-on-drugs-filmmaker-tackles-the-predatory-monster
How do you make a filmabout a subject as expansive and many-tentacled as the drug war? Doyou focus on its circuitous history? The injustices of sentencing?The destructive effects on families and communities? The profitmotives that fuel the system? The impact on policing, law enforcementand public safety? The ways in which entrenched racism and classismdictate the system's targets? The answer for filmmaker Eugene Jareckiwas a whopping "all of the above." In the stunning "TheHouse I Live In," he depicts the vast sweep of this insidiouscampaign's effects, while portraying the nuanced – often conflicted– views of the political and economic players who perpetuate it.The film delivers a multi-dimensional picture of an issue of whichwe're usually able to view only slices, demonstrating, in sum, thecolossal failure of the 40-year "war on drugs." I got onthe phone with Jarecki to discuss the film, and how he is using it asa tool to spark tangible action.
Maya Schenwar: "TheHouse I Live In" covers such a massive and complex topic, andyou captured that complexity while showing that there is a very clearverdict as to whether or not the war on drugs has worked. Sometimeswhen progressives talk about these issues, the evils of the systemseem to get personified in this way that's not helpful (the policeare "evil," a particular judge or politician is "evil,"etc.). But you interviewed police, prison guards, judges - all thosefolks - and you didn't hear the things we might expect to hear fromthem. So, I'm wondering, how did you decide who to interview, andwhat was that process of decision-making like?
Eugene Jarecki: Iwanted to portray the fullness of the issue. As the drug war hasgrown over time, it's like any predatory monster; it knows no bounds.I was convinced from early on we needed to travel far and wide andtalk to people at all levels of the drug war, from the dealer and theuser to family members to community members to cops, jailers, judges,lawyers, wardens and then - ultimately - to policymakers.
I wanted to see howpeople inside the system felt, far more than I wanted to hear fromcritics. There are critical voices in the film, people like DavidSimon and Richard Miller and Charles Ogletree and Michelle Alexander- very smart critics who put what the viewer sees in the largerpolitical and historical context - but what mattered most to us wasthe firsthand experience and testimony of the people whose storiesare wrapped up in this issue.
People surprised usgreatly. You go into the prison system and you think, well, thepeople who run Corrections, they'll be the real "tough on crime"people, and they'll explain to me how they see the world, which willstand in great opposition to the way a drug dealer I just spoke tosees the world. But we found out how many people on the inside, upand down the chain of command, viewed the system deeply critically.That was unexpected, and that became the most inspiring part ofmaking the film.
Almost no one believesin this system. In looking for diversity - crossing the country andencountering so many different walks of life and so many geographies- I ended up finding an extraordinary unanimity: the idea that thedrug war has been with us for 40 years, we've spent a trilliondollars on it, we've had 45 million drug arrests, and we have nothingto show for it. So, it was almost impossible to find someone whowould defend a record like that.
MS: Wow. Did you meetanyone who did wholeheartedly defend it?
EJ: No. The onlypeople who come close to wholehearted defense - and it's halfhearteddefense in their case, honestly - are the people on the profiteeringside of the war on drugs, whose livelihood depends on it. So, as inso many professions that have a dark subtext, they've developed asort of Orwellian doubletalk, to euphemize and obfuscate about whatthey do. They have all kinds of prepared argumentation about thebenefits of the way in which they profit from it, the services theyprovide. Their phone services are better, or they sell a better stungun than the other stun gun, or their restraint chair is better thanthe old kind of restraint chair that another company made. At themicro level, they may all have something to say about how they'remaking a better good or service at a better value, but it is withinwhat even they would recognize is not the best way to make a living -it's probably not the career they dreamed of when they were in highschool.
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Now certainly, allacross the country, you'll find that there are people who believethat the legal system should be uncompromising when it comes to theviolent and the super-violent. But we're talking about incarcerationon a mass scale of the nonviolent - people who do not pose a threatto you or me; they pose a threat mostly to themselves. Who woulddefend sentences for the nonviolent that are often longer thansentences for the violent? That anomaly in the American legal systemdoesn't have a lot of advocates - certainly not the judges who, halfthe time, are forced to give sentences they feel are inappropriate.The mandatory minimum laws that set minimum penalties [for drugoffenses and certain other crimes] are so far-reaching in Americathat the judges find their options incredibly limited. One judge saidto me, "The kid standing before me on a crack cocaine chargewith a previous offense, also nonviolent, is facing 20-year mandatoryminimum for five grams. If he had won the medal of honor or pulledhis grandmother out of a burning building yesterday, I couldn't takethat into account in his sentencing."
Across the country, wefound this almost unanimous chorus of voices agreeing that thissystem doesn't make any sense. It is a victim of the same corruptionof politics that's ruining so many walks of life in America:corporate America and Congress are in an unholy alliance with eachother, in which Congress members ensure their electability byservicing their corporate patrons, who then bring jobs to theirdistricts and money to their campaign coffers. That unholy allianceis behind the military industrial complex, it's behind thepharmaceutical industry, it's why we have the insurance corruption wehave, it's behind the banks, it's why the polluters get away withmurder. The prison-industrial complex is just, perhaps, the mostobscene example of that phenomenon that has taken over every walk ofAmerican life.
MS: So, even if webelieve that these policies need to change, and even if the majorityof the country believes it - if corporate interests are calling theshots, it seems so tough to cut through those profit motives. Fromyour experience working on the film, can you describe thepossibilities you see for breaking out of that cycle of profit-drivenmass incarceration?
EJ: Revolutionshappen in societies. They even happen when there are industries anddeeply entrenched interests that have come to rely on the status quo.Believe me, there were vast economic dependencies built into slavery.I believe that, ultimately, the reason the prison industrial complexis vulnerable is that with both its record of failure and its levelof expenditure, it's harder and harder to defend at a time whencountry is so economically challenged. At a time like this, agigantic, wasteful program like our system of mass incarceration issuddenly susceptible to attack not only from those who think it'smorally bankrupting, but also those who see it is economicallybankrupting. This isn't an actual business that makes a product thatyou can sell to somebody, or that other countries can buy. You can'tsell the misery of a prisoner. You can't sell his destroyed family,his orphaned children, his shattered community.
In fact, this"product" weakens us in the world because it erodesAmerica's workforce. Imagine all the people wasting away in jailright now who are simply drug-addicted people... How many of ourfamous geniuses were [drug users], from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs?Who knows who's wasting away in a prison cell right now that couldhave made the next big thing that would help America's economy?There's nothing productive about digging a giant hole in the groundand throwing your own people and your own money into it.
This system alsorepresents an overexpansion of government and a giant bureaucracy, sothat those like Grover Norquist and Pat Robertson who are against thedrug war can find common ground with people like Danny Glover andCornel West, who see the drug war as ethically, socially andspiritually destructive to America. How our beacon of democracy canreconcile that identity with having become the world's largest jailor- it's very difficult for a wide range of people to get their headsaround it.
MS: So, it seems likethere are some great alliances emerging in the activist communityaround the drug war and mass incarceration. But regardless of thekinds of grassroots work being done, incarceration and the drug wardon't make nice campaign issues, because lawmakers "have"to talk about being tough on crime. For us, as people who want tomake a difference, what can we do to put pressure on our electedofficials and bring these issues to their attention?
EJ: Well, Irecommend several things people can do. With the film, we are tryingto shed light on how important it is that people going forward hearthe phrase "drug war" as a dirty word, like slavery, or JimCrow. First and foremost, the movie is meant to show thewrongheadedness of this 40-year campaign, whose failure demonstratesits misconception of the problem. So I want to make sure there's avery clear recognition in the public space that those days of buyinginto that logic are over. For everyday people, that means they haveto internalize that idea, and become walking messengers of it - totheir friends, over email, through any organizations they belong to.That also means that when a politician comes before us and uses thekind of "tough on crime" rhetoric that politicians used touse to work the public into a frenzy and get them to supportdraconian sentencing and law enforcement, we must boo and hiss them.It should be like someone standing there giving you all the reasonswhy you should support slavery - you would boo and hiss them untilthey were replaced with someone who spoke like we do in the modernworld.
Instead, we need to betalking about smart on crime legislation, which means treatment, andcareful and judicious use of the law - frankly, far more like whatRichard Nixon did. Even though Nixon launched the war on drugs, as apolicymaker, he had a very interesting balance: he spent the majorityof his drug budget on treatment and the minority on law enforcement.We do the reverse.
We also want to lookat other examples in the world. Portugal has decriminalizedpossession across the board. They maintain the power to incarceratethose who deal drugs, but have stopped incarcerating those who usethem - and the results have been extraordinary, by every leadingindicator: social, economic and legal.
So, the goal for thepublic is to make them aware of the problems with the drug war andshift their voting patterns so they are driven by sanity on this mostimportant issue of social justice in American life.
At the local level ofeffecting change, the public has a different role. At our website,you have the opportunity to enter your zip code and find out who'sworking to fight against the drug war in your area, and how you mightfit into the effort to change this horrible situation.... State bystate across the country, there are policies - like "threestrikes" in Californiai and stop-and-frisk in New York - thatmust be the focus of anyone concerned with the war on drugs, so thatthe deep local underpinnings of the system begin to be shaken, whilewe sink into the reform level more broadly at the top.
MS: In terms of policychange: the film points toward ending mandatory minimums, and otherreforms that would substantially decrease the incarceration of drugoffenders. But I start thinking about all the people - including someof the people interviewed in the film - who commit crimes that aren'texplicitly drug crimes (like trafficking or possession), but they'restill crimes that are committed in order to obtain drugs: robbery, orburglary, or sometimes even violent crimes. These crimes arehappening because these people are caught up in the system, andoften, because they're addicted to drugs. But since those crimes arenot explicitly drug crimes, would they also be confronted differentlyin the new system you're pointing toward?
EJ: Well, in aworld where you emphasize treatment in society, you wouldn't let goof the fact that we have, appropriately, very tough laws for violentcrimes like rape and murder. But in our current system, by having ablurry approach to drug addiction in which you treat addiction like aviolent crime, we're actually creating more criminals and increasingviolence. We take a nonviolent person who's simply struggling withtheir own addiction, and incarcerate them, and in prison, they learnto become more advanced criminals; we concentrate that person'seducation in more violent criminality, in a confined space wherethere are few other role models. They then come out with a strike ontheir record, making it nearly impossible for them to get a job,therefore increasing the likelihood that they will get involved inthe underground economy and use their newly learned violent tactics.
Likewise, when weempower and incentivize police to rack up untold numbers of pettydrug arrests, rather than focusing their energy on more seriouscrimes, we compromise public safety as well, because now we havepolice on the street filling quotas and earning overtime by involvingthemselves with nonviolent petty drug arrests; more serious crimes goon around them with insufficient pursuit.
If drugs were notcriminalized in the way that they are, if they were controlled assubstances and people were given treatment, you would have far lessviolence associated with addiction, because people would be dealingwith far less addiction. By leaving addiction untreated, we leave itthere to foster violence and criminality.
MS: Going back to theway in which you're hoping the film will lead to a shift in publicopinion: it has always frustrated me that mainstream media tend toveer away from criminal justice in this way - they often bypass theinjustices of the system and focus on "crime" in a vacuum.Can you talk about the ways in which you're using the film as a toolto build awareness and advocacy?
EJ: What we'redoing with the film is very much educated by what I've learned overthe years through making other films. I learned with those films thatalthough they enjoyed the life of high-profile documentaries, thatwas a limited life, because documentaries in America are distributedwith some prejudices about who the movie-going public is. It wasclear to us that some of the key audiences to whom the film wouldmatter the most - a lot of them live in places, whether in the innercity or in the heartland of this country, that don't typically haveart houses that show serious documentaries. So we knew from early onwe would pursue screenings in schools, churches, prisons and otherpublic institutions.
Some of the mostexciting screenings we've had have been in prisons: we were givenremarkable access to show the film in several prisons in Oklahoma.The prisoners were made very angry by the film in one way, because itexplains a lot about the unfairnesses that have befallen them, but atthe same time they felt loved - by those of us that made the film,and even by the Department of Corrections of Oklahoma, that waswilling to respect them enough to show them the film and bring theminto this conversation. Those screenings in prisons have been deeplyinspiring. I'm also speaking in churches and schools in Chicago, LosAngeles, New York and across the country.
The goal is to bringan ever-growing cross-section of Americans into this extremelyimportant and sensitive conversation, and build an ever-growingconstituency that recognizes that we need a change here. Thisincludes people who work in the prison system and are worried aboutlosing their jobs. In a treatment-based system there are a ton ofjobs: it's a huge thing to be able to deal with the most massiveaddiction problem of any country on earth. Many of these [prisonemployees] have worked for decades to try to help people steer clearof their addiction; they've just done it in incarceration settings.
I want to see us focuson treatment in a real way, where all these people could shift intojobs in which they're proud of what they do. There's nothing scaryabout this. We once went from buggy whips to automobiles - and yes,it was a change, and there were growing pains, but I don't thinkanyone wishes we'd go back to buggy whips.
We have newinformation about the drug war now. Decades have told us that this isnot the way to do it! So we've got to regroup and find an inspiredway of becoming the envy of the world instead of the laughingstock -or rather, the cryingstock - of the world.
MS: I love that ideaof not only taking the film to various communities, but also takingit inside, and hopefully sparking productive conversations amongpeople who are directly affected. In talking to prisoners myself, Iam struck by their views on and their understanding of theparticulars of the incarceration system - they're such an importantpart of this discussion.
EJ: I've made arule with my team: we're not taking on any new film production untilfurther notice so that we can do best job of getting this film out atthe grassroots level. We're devoting every ounce of energy to gettingthis film out so we can make some change here. I don't just want tobe a merchant of despair; I don't want to just sell sad stories for aticket price and have people buy popcorn and see how terribly we'retreating our fellow human beings. I want to see this system getbetter!
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