Pubdate: Fri, 26 Oct 2012
Source: Austin American-Statesman (TX)
Copyright: 2012 Mcclatchy tribune News Service
Contact: http://www.statesman.com/default/content/feedback/lettersubmit.html
Website: http://www.statesman.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/32
Author: Roger Moore
Note: rating: Unrated, drug abuse, language. running time: 1 hour, 48 
minutes. theater: Arbor.

DRUG-WAR FILM HURT BY PERSONAL DETOUR

Strong case for new approach weakened by contrived link to director's life.

"The House I Live In" is an ambitious documentary about the real 
object of the war on drugs, and the real results of it. Director 
Eugene Jarecki offers proof and expert testimony that traces the war 
to efforts to isolate an activity of America's counterculture, an 
effort that turned into wars against entire communities.

Jarecki makes a pretty good case, because the evidence - that cocaine 
became a criminal justice obsession at a time of rising black 
ambitions in the U.S., that marijuana became demonized only with the 
rise of Latin culture in the U.S. - is there.

The payoff has been an endless war that's gutted communities and 
turned police into drug-money seeking bounty hunters.

Jarecki follows cops from Miami to New Mexico and sees how their work 
has been perverted and their community standing eroded by civil 
liberty violations that have come with the "get tough on drugs" emphasis.

Jarecki builds the trail of evidence from Richard Nixon's politically 
savvy but idealistic war that included generous funding for 
rehabilitation, to Ronald Reagan and other presidents' posturing over 
the issue.

Millions are spent for more prison cells, and Jarecki reinforces 
those statistics with others - 1.7 million U.S. children "now have a 
parent in prison."

Neighborhoods riven by police sweeps and small-time arrests lose 
businesses, schools fail, families collapse and a cycle of failure forms.

Jarecki follows the case of a 24-year-old who is having the book 
thrown at him for a relatively minor infraction, tracks down the 
kids' junkie father, and meets a judge who is speaking out against 
these politically motivated sentencing guidelines.

Where his film fails is in Jarecki's attempts to tie himself and his 
well-off family to the tale. We meet Nannie Jeter, the woman who 
raised him, and hear Jarecki wonder why some of her black 
working-class family wound up dead or in trouble.

And we go "duh" when Nannie Jeter tells us, and him, that she was too 
busy raising the Jarecki kids in a distant city and not raising her own.

Jarecki's film makes some great points, but he undercuts his 
arguments with that precious tale-of two-families hook that he hangs 
this film on.
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