Film Analysis: The House I Live In

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The House I Live In approaches America’s war on drugs from multiple fronts, including the perspectives of inmates, law enforcement, federal judges, family members, etc. According to the film, the war on drugs has produced “more than 45 million arrests, $1 trillion dollars in government spending, and America’s role as the world’s largest jailer” (Jarecki 2013). Not only did the film examine these effects of the war on drugs, but it also observed the devastation to numerous individuals and families, the political and monetary motives of the drug war, and its failure but persistence throughout the modern era. As a talking point of modern politics, politicians typically need to take a “tough on crime” stance in order to get elected to office. …show more content…
There was a scene in the film where an officer stated that since they have seen countless drug dealers and generally know what they look like, they use profiling and pretextual stops in order to catch them. A pretextual stop involves stopping an individual for a minor traffic violation so that the officer can further investigate the car for drugs. Furthering the injustice, it was specified that these officers sometimes lack cause for arresting an individual and do not use probable cause. Lee Brown, former NYPD commissioner, once stated, “It's easier for police to make an arrest when you have people selling drugs on the street corner than those who are in the suburbs or in office buildings. The end result is that more blacks are arrested than whites because of the relative ease in making those arrests” (Fellner 2010). In fact, out of the millions of arrests between 1980-2007, “black men and women increased from 27% in 1980 to a high ranging from 40% to 42% between 1989 and 1993, and then declined more or less steadily to the current percentage of 35%” (Fellner 2010). These statistics show the disproportionate number of arrests African Americans faced in relation to the population. “In 1980 blacks were arrested at rates almost three (2.9) times the rate of whites. In the years with the worst disparities, between 1988 and 1993, blacks were arrested at rates more than five times the rate