As you may have been able to tell by two of my previous blogs, I enjoy watching CJ documentaries. Not only are the interesting and relevant, but they also give my an excuse to sit in my bed and watch Netflix for two hours and call it "homework". With that being said I find these documentaries insightful to the future application of my education as a CJ major. The topic I'm writing about (yes its supposed to be for next week but oh well) is to find something that makes an argument about your field. Whether it be a book, scholarly article, or documentary, find something that brings up something about your field and see what they have to say. The House I Live in, produced, directed, and featured in by Eugene Jarecki, makes one of the biggest and controversial arguments in the American Criminal Justice System today: the War on Drugs has been a huge failure. They in fact say it has done more harm than good, destroying communities while the drug trade is as strong as it was forty years ago when it was created. And I agree with them, it has been a failure.
With that big of a statement, you have to have some proof to back it up. Well, here it is. Jarecki interviewed almost everyone connected to drugs in America. Narcotics officers, normal police officers, corrections officers, prominent members of the media, doctors, professors, judges, and even (alleged) drug dealers, past and present. They all say pretty much the same thing. The war on drugs cannot be won, and it often does more harm than help in the long run. But at one time, the American people thought it was a wonderful idea. And the idea itself is good, to get rid of drugs in America. That's what Richard Nixon thought, and in 1971 he officially coined the term "War on drugs". The 1960s was a time of radical change, with civil rights, Vietnam, and the rebellion of a whole generation who were labeled as "pot smoking hippies". Human nature and society is reactive, not proactive, so naturally the American people wanted to get some law and order. Enter Nixon condemning drugs as the "primary enemy of the USA". It at first was good, primarily because the majority of the money was going towards rehabilitation, not law enforcement. Drugs were on the decline at the turn of the decade, enter Ronald Reagan. Reagan was seen as very tough on crime, and with the mass hysteria of the new dangerous drug crack cocaine (cocaine heated up with baking soda and water), he approved Congress' new mandatory sentencing laws involving drugs. Here is the root problem to the war.
Law enforcement was arresting non violent drug offenders and putting them away for decades purely because the law said they had to. This caused a severe spike in incarceration, specifically for blacks in the 1980s due to crack. Soon after in the 1990s when methamphetamines became the new crack, whites saw an equal boom in their prison population. The vast majority of these being lower class males who either lost their jobs or grew up in a place where jobs were almost nonexistent. 45 million arrests and one trillion dollars later, there has been no change.
So if it isn't working, why keep pouring time, money, and lives into a war that cannot be won? This problem is bigger than law enforcement arresting everyone with weed in their pocket, it goes higher up to Washington. Both sides of politics, liberal and conservative, have supported this war for decades because there is money to be made somewhere. Private prisons have popped up all over, offering jobs to the town it resides in and money for everyone. However in order for their to be money, there needs to be bodies in the cells. It creates an irrational demand for prisoners, continuing the vicious cycle. Someone grows up in a bad neighborhood without good influences and then they get into drugs. They have kids along the way. And when they get caught, they go to prison for decades, leaving their kids without parents. Rinse and repeat.
Overall I thought that the argument presented worked because it had primary accounts from both sides of the "war on drugs". And both the enforcement side and the drug side said that it doesn't work, and only leads to distrust between law enforcement and their communities. Hopefully legislation can work towards putting money in the community to prevent drug use, not just for putting the drug users away. And in no way shape or form do I think violent drug offenders should get this treatment. I am very okay with locking them up for good. It was a great documentary and I recommend it to everyone in America, because we are all in this war in some way.
All facts and statistics were taken from "The House I Live In"
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