What I'm Watching and Reading: 'The House I Live In' and 'The New Jim Crow'

The House I Live In - Official Trailer 

Eugene Jarecki's documentary about the war on drugs was very unsettling. While I already knew about some aspects of American justice such as California's 'three strikes' law and the problem of overcrowded prisons in this state, I was unaware just how many life sentences are being served in American jails for relatively minor drug offenses. I was also unaware of how arbitrarily draconian drug laws can be and how unaccountable police forces sometimes are, depending on state laws.

Jarecki does a great job of peeling back the layers of the War on Drugs, revealing bit by bit just how out of control drug laws have become. And yet despite the waste of $1 trillion of tax revenue for a cause that is no longer even top priority for most Americans, no politician is doing anything to initiate reform. 

Part of the reason for this is that 'judicial reform' is such an abstract concept that it just doesn't have much real meaning for most of us. Drug crime is also an issue that makes us switch off. Nobody has sympathy for potheads and crack addicts who end up in jail, let alone drug dealers. They chose to take the drugs, after all, didn't they?

One speaker in Jarecki's documentary, Michelle Alexander, was convincing enough to make me reassess this attitude, however, and I recently read her book 'The New Jim Crow' for my book club. It is a great companion to Jarecki's documentary as it highlights how the 'War on Drugs' has disproportionately affected people of color in America.

Alexander uses her considerable legal expertise through work at the ACLU, among other roles, to show how drug laws have been manipulated to corrupt the judicial system and condemn entire swathes of the poor in America to permanent social exclusion as felons. While the title of Alexander's book is inflammatory and the thesis that drug laws were deliberately engineered to oppress African-Americans not completely convincing, her point that the poor and marginalized are unfairly targeted for persecution under those laws is valid. 

As Jarecki points out too in his documentary, this is how police states start out. The Nazis didn't start with extermination immediately. Persecution in Nazi Germany started with a propaganda program to clean up society so that Germany could achieve its world-historical destiny as a great power. As part of that, certain groups were designated 'undesirables' whose removal from society would be a good thing.

Once these 'undesirables' became set apart from others, subject to different laws and sent to camps that were far away from the German heartlands, nobody really cared to ask what happened to them. It wasn't necessary for the Nazis to do very much to then progress to the extermination of these people. The apparatus of setting people apart, subjecting them to different laws and creating the camp apparatus in the first place was the key step, not the Wannsee Conference or the development of Zyklon B.

This for me was the main value in the work of Jarecki and Alexander. By highlighting the way that drugs laws can be applied arbitrarily or unconsciously to achieve very sinister social outcomes, it makes us all more aware of how fragile and precious our social freedoms are.