It is pointless to speak to the system when all know it is wrong. We
have a body of people paid to administer a body of legislation that
is clearly wrong and no one is able to stop. We have a war machine
with no path to victory using present tools but still manning the
trenches. It no longer can even muster a fair vote to maintain the
status 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 is
the secure government job that depends on all this. How banal can we
make the war on drugs?
The People Vs. the
War on Drugs: Filmmaker Tackles the "Predatory Monster"
Tuesday, 13 November
2012 09:12By Maya Schenwar,
How do you make a film
about a subject as expansive and many-tentacled as the drug war? Do
you focus on its circuitous history? The injustices of sentencing?
The destructive effects on families and communities? The profit
motives that fuel the system? The impact on policing, law enforcement
and public safety? The ways in which entrenched racism and classism
dictate the system's targets? The answer for filmmaker Eugene Jarecki
was a whopping "all of the above." In the stunning "The
House I Live In," he depicts the vast sweep of this insidious
campaign'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 which
we're usually able to view only slices, demonstrating, in sum, the
colossal failure of the 40-year "war on drugs." I got on
the phone with Jarecki to discuss the film, and how he is using it as
a tool to spark tangible action.
Maya Schenwar: "The
House I Live In" covers such a massive and complex topic, and
you captured that complexity while showing that there is a very clear
verdict as to whether or not the war on drugs has worked. Sometimes
when progressives talk about these issues, the evils of the system
seem to get personified in this way that's not helpful (the police
are "evil," a particular judge or politician is "evil,"
etc.). But you interviewed police, prison guards, judges - all those
folks - and you didn't hear the things we might expect to hear from
them. So, I'm wondering, how did you decide who to interview, and
what was that process of decision-making like?
Eugene Jarecki: I
wanted to portray the fullness of the issue. As the drug war has
grown 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 and
talk to people at all levels of the drug war, from the dealer and the
user to family members to community members to cops, jailers, judges,
lawyers, wardens and then - ultimately - to policymakers.
I wanted to see how
people inside the system felt, far more than I wanted to hear from
critics. There are critical voices in the film, people like David
Simon and Richard Miller and Charles Ogletree and Michelle Alexander
- very smart critics who put what the viewer sees in the larger
political and historical context - but what mattered most to us was
the firsthand experience and testimony of the people whose stories
are wrapped up in this issue.
People surprised us
greatly. You go into the prison system and you think, well, the
people who run Corrections, they'll be the real "tough on crime"
people, and they'll explain to me how they see the world, which will
stand in great opposition to the way a drug dealer I just spoke to
sees the world. But we found out how many people on the inside, up
and down the chain of command, viewed the system deeply critically.
That was unexpected, and that became the most inspiring part of
making the film.
Almost no one believes
in this system. In looking for diversity - crossing the country and
encountering so many different walks of life and so many geographies
- I ended up finding an extraordinary unanimity: the idea that the
drug war has been with us for 40 years, we've spent a trillion
dollars on it, we've had 45 million drug arrests, and we have nothing
to show for it. So, it was almost impossible to find someone who
would defend a record like that.
MS: Wow. Did you meet
anyone who did wholeheartedly defend it?
EJ: No. The only
people who come close to wholehearted defense - and it's halfhearted
defense in their case, honestly - are the people on the profiteering
side of the war on drugs, whose livelihood depends on it. So, as in
so many professions that have a dark subtext, they've developed a
sort of Orwellian doubletalk, to euphemize and obfuscate about what
they do. They have all kinds of prepared argumentation about the
benefits of the way in which they profit from it, the services they
provide. Their phone services are better, or they sell a better stun
gun than the other stun gun, or their restraint chair is better than
the old kind of restraint chair that another company made. At the
micro level, they may all have something to say about how they're
making a better good or service at a better value, but it is within
what 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 high
school.
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Now certainly, all
across the country, you'll find that there are people who believe
that the legal system should be uncompromising when it comes to the
violent and the super-violent. But we're talking about incarceration
on a mass scale of the nonviolent - people who do not pose a threat
to you or me; they pose a threat mostly to themselves. Who would
defend sentences for the nonviolent that are often longer than
sentences for the violent? That anomaly in the American legal system
doesn't have a lot of advocates - certainly not the judges who, half
the time, are forced to give sentences they feel are inappropriate.
The mandatory minimum laws that set minimum penalties [for drug
offenses and certain other crimes] are so far-reaching in America
that the judges find their options incredibly limited. One judge said
to me, "The kid standing before me on a crack cocaine charge
with a previous offense, also nonviolent, is facing 20-year mandatory
minimum for five grams. If he had won the medal of honor or pulled
his grandmother out of a burning building yesterday, I couldn't take
that into account in his sentencing."
Across the country, we
found this almost unanimous chorus of voices agreeing that this
system doesn't make any sense. It is a victim of the same corruption
of politics that's ruining so many walks of life in America:
corporate America and Congress are in an unholy alliance with each
other, in which Congress members ensure their electability by
servicing their corporate patrons, who then bring jobs to their
districts and money to their campaign coffers. That unholy alliance
is behind the military industrial complex, it's behind the
pharmaceutical industry, it's why we have the insurance corruption we
have, it's behind the banks, it's why the polluters get away with
murder. The prison-industrial complex is just, perhaps, the most
obscene example of that phenomenon that has taken over every walk of
American life.
MS: So, even if we
believe that these policies need to change, and even if the majority
of the country believes it - if corporate interests are calling the
shots, it seems so tough to cut through those profit motives. From
your experience working on the film, can you describe the
possibilities you see for breaking out of that cycle of profit-driven
mass incarceration?
EJ: Revolutions
happen in societies. They even happen when there are industries and
deeply 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 complex
is vulnerable is that with both its record of failure and its level
of expenditure, it's harder and harder to defend at a time when
country is so economically challenged. At a time like this, a
gigantic, wasteful program like our system of mass incarceration is
suddenly susceptible to attack not only from those who think it's
morally bankrupting, but also those who see it is economically
bankrupting. This isn't an actual business that makes a product that
you can sell to somebody, or that other countries can buy. You can't
sell 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 erodes
America's workforce. Imagine all the people wasting away in jail
right now who are simply drug-addicted people... How many of our
famous geniuses were [drug users], from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs?
Who knows who's wasting away in a prison cell right now that could
have made the next big thing that would help America's economy?
There's nothing productive about digging a giant hole in the ground
and throwing your own people and your own money into it.
This system also
represents an overexpansion of government and a giant bureaucracy, so
that those like Grover Norquist and Pat Robertson who are against the
drug war can find common ground with people like Danny Glover and
Cornel West, who see the drug war as ethically, socially and
spiritually destructive to America. How our beacon of democracy can
reconcile that identity with having become the world's largest jailor
- it's very difficult for a wide range of people to get their heads
around it.
MS: So, it seems like
there are some great alliances emerging in the activist community
around the drug war and mass incarceration. But regardless of the
kinds of grassroots work being done, incarceration and the drug war
don't make nice campaign issues, because lawmakers "have"
to talk about being tough on crime. For us, as people who want to
make a difference, what can we do to put pressure on our elected
officials and bring these issues to their attention?
EJ: Well, I
recommend several things people can do. With the film, we are trying
to shed light on how important it is that people going forward hear
the phrase "drug war" as a dirty word, like slavery, or Jim
Crow. First and foremost, the movie is meant to show the
wrongheadedness of this 40-year campaign, whose failure demonstrates
its misconception of the problem. So I want to make sure there's a
very clear recognition in the public space that those days of buying
into that logic are over. For everyday people, that means they have
to internalize that idea, and become walking messengers of it - to
their friends, over email, through any organizations they belong to.
That also means that when a politician comes before us and uses the
kind of "tough on crime" rhetoric that politicians used to
use to work the public into a frenzy and get them to support
draconian sentencing and law enforcement, we must boo and hiss them.
It should be like someone standing there giving you all the reasons
why you should support slavery - you would boo and hiss them until
they were replaced with someone who spoke like we do in the modern
world.
Instead, we need to be
talking about smart on crime legislation, which means treatment, and
careful and judicious use of the law - frankly, far more like what
Richard Nixon did. Even though Nixon launched the war on drugs, as a
policymaker, he had a very interesting balance: he spent the majority
of his drug budget on treatment and the minority on law enforcement.
We do the reverse.
We also want to look
at other examples in the world. Portugal has decriminalized
possession across the board. They maintain the power to incarcerate
those who deal drugs, but have stopped incarcerating those who use
them - and the results have been extraordinary, by every leading
indicator: social, economic and legal.
So, the goal for the
public is to make them aware of the problems with the drug war and
shift their voting patterns so they are driven by sanity on this most
important issue of social justice in American life.
At the local level of
effecting change, the public has a different role. At our website,
you have the opportunity to enter your zip code and find out who's
working to fight against the drug war in your area, and how you might
fit into the effort to change this horrible situation.... State by
state across the country, there are policies - like "three
strikes" in Californiai and stop-and-frisk in New York - that
must be the focus of anyone concerned with the war on drugs, so that
the deep local underpinnings of the system begin to be shaken, while
we sink into the reform level more broadly at the top.
MS: In terms of policy
change: the film points toward ending mandatory minimums, and other
reforms that would substantially decrease the incarceration of drug
offenders. But I start thinking about all the people - including some
of the people interviewed in the film - who commit crimes that aren't
explicitly drug crimes (like trafficking or possession), but they're
still crimes that are committed in order to obtain drugs: robbery, or
burglary, or sometimes even violent crimes. These crimes are
happening because these people are caught up in the system, and
often, because they're addicted to drugs. But since those crimes are
not explicitly drug crimes, would they also be confronted differently
in the new system you're pointing toward?
EJ: Well, in a
world where you emphasize treatment in society, you wouldn't let go
of the fact that we have, appropriately, very tough laws for violent
crimes like rape and murder. But in our current system, by having a
blurry approach to drug addiction in which you treat addiction like a
violent crime, we're actually creating more criminals and increasing
violence. We take a nonviolent person who's simply struggling with
their own addiction, and incarcerate them, and in prison, they learn
to become more advanced criminals; we concentrate that person's
education in more violent criminality, in a confined space where
there are few other role models. They then come out with a strike on
their record, making it nearly impossible for them to get a job,
therefore increasing the likelihood that they will get involved in
the underground economy and use their newly learned violent tactics.
Likewise, when we
empower and incentivize police to rack up untold numbers of petty
drug arrests, rather than focusing their energy on more serious
crimes, we compromise public safety as well, because now we have
police on the street filling quotas and earning overtime by involving
themselves with nonviolent petty drug arrests; more serious crimes go
on around them with insufficient pursuit.
If drugs were not
criminalized in the way that they are, if they were controlled as
substances and people were given treatment, you would have far less
violence associated with addiction, because people would be dealing
with far less addiction. By leaving addiction untreated, we leave it
there to foster violence and criminality.
MS: Going back to the
way in which you're hoping the film will lead to a shift in public
opinion: it has always frustrated me that mainstream media tend to
veer away from criminal justice in this way - they often bypass the
injustices 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 tool
to build awareness and advocacy?
EJ: What we're
doing with the film is very much educated by what I've learned over
the years through making other films. I learned with those films that
although they enjoyed the life of high-profile documentaries, that
was a limited life, because documentaries in America are distributed
with some prejudices about who the movie-going public is. It was
clear to us that some of the key audiences to whom the film would
matter the most - a lot of them live in places, whether in the inner
city or in the heartland of this country, that don't typically have
art houses that show serious documentaries. So we knew from early on
we would pursue screenings in schools, churches, prisons and other
public institutions.
Some of the most
exciting screenings we've had have been in prisons: we were given
remarkable access to show the film in several prisons in Oklahoma.
The prisoners were made very angry by the film in one way, because it
explains a lot about the unfairnesses that have befallen them, but at
the same time they felt loved - by those of us that made the film,
and even by the Department of Corrections of Oklahoma, that was
willing to respect them enough to show them the film and bring them
into this conversation. Those screenings in prisons have been deeply
inspiring. I'm also speaking in churches and schools in Chicago, Los
Angeles, New York and across the country.
The goal is to bring
an ever-growing cross-section of Americans into this extremely
important and sensitive conversation, and build an ever-growing
constituency that recognizes that we need a change here. This
includes people who work in the prison system and are worried about
losing their jobs. In a treatment-based system there are a ton of
jobs: it's a huge thing to be able to deal with the most massive
addiction problem of any country on earth. Many of these [prison
employees] have worked for decades to try to help people steer clear
of their addiction; they've just done it in incarceration settings.
I want to see us focus
on treatment in a real way, where all these people could shift into
jobs in which they're proud of what they do. There's nothing scary
about this. We once went from buggy whips to automobiles - and yes,
it was a change, and there were growing pains, but I don't think
anyone wishes we'd go back to buggy whips.
We have new
information about the drug war now. Decades have told us that this is
not the way to do it! So we've got to regroup and find an inspired
way of becoming the envy of the world instead of the laughingstock -
or rather, the cryingstock - of the world.
MS: I love that idea
of not only taking the film to various communities, but also taking
it inside, and hopefully sparking productive conversations among
people who are directly affected. In talking to prisoners myself, I
am struck by their views on and their understanding of the
particulars of the incarceration system - they're such an important
part of this discussion.
EJ: I've made a
rule with my team: we're not taking on any new film production until
further notice so that we can do best job of getting this film out at
the grassroots level. We're devoting every ounce of energy to getting
this film out so we can make some change here. I don't just want to
be a merchant of despair; I don't want to just sell sad stories for a
ticket price and have people buy popcorn and see how terribly we're
treating our fellow human beings. I want to see this system get
better!
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