Abstract
Eugene Jarecki’s documentary, The House I Live In, is a polemical attack on America’s “War on drugs.” It draws upon critical criminology to expose issues of racialized power and inequality in the criminal justice system, and does so in a way that attempts to force viewers into questioning themselves and the world they live in. The film won a Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012 and follows on from Jarecki’s successful films presenting critical liberal accounts of recent political history (The Trials of Henry Kissinger, 2002; Reagan, 2011), capitalist economics (Freakonomics, 2010), and contemporary American foreign policy (Why We Fight, 2005).
Media representations of crime and criminal justice have been increasingly discussed in academic literature. It is argued that media representations shape public perceptions, partly because direct personal experience is relatively low, and therefore the media plays an important role in informing views (Surrette, 1997). It has been argued that nonfiction representations of crime and criminals, such as news and documentary, are dominated by state officials, to the exclusion of other interested parties, and are largely concerned with the production and maintenance of order, including social hierarchies, the dominant construction of morality, and legitimizing the institutional structures (Ericson, Baranek, & Chan, 1991). As the first and most important source of information, official sources are the “primary definers” of media coverage and therefore set the agenda for public discourse (Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, & Robert, 1978). Representation often dehumanize offenders by either refusing them a voice (presenting them in frozen mug shots, court sketches, or grabbed film of them being hurriedly removed from courts), and even when they are portrayed more fully, alienating devices are common such as obscured features, dramatic reconstructions, or voice-overs that foreground their offending (Mason, 1995). In contrast, in The House I Live In, Eugene Jarecki attempts to challenge and confront the established order and deconstruct the dominant values that sustain the “War on drugs.” This review will focus on three aspects of the film: the content of the criticisms the film presents, the methods of communicating its messages, and the apparent audience.
The main argument of the film is that the “War on drugs” has been ineffective in reducing drug misuse and has had a devastating impact on communities and criminal justice institutions. The film argues that the impact has fallen particularly heavily on Black and minority ethnic communities. The impact is presented as reverberating through generations. It is also suggested that criminal justice institutions including police, courts, and prisons are creaking under the economic and emotional weight of the work. In other words, the film represents a “crisis of legitimacy” (Cavadino & Dignan, 2007, p. 23), where the system has chronically failed to provide a sense of justice to those who operate it, those who are subject to it, and those on whose behalf it is provided.
However, the film goes further in order to reveal how the “War on drugs” is deeply rooted in structures of power and inequality. The criminalization of drugs is set in historical context, suggesting that this has been used in the past as a way of problematizing migrant and minority groups in America such as Chinese (opium), Mexicans (marijuana), and the urban Black population (crack). These arguments are pushed to their furthest limit, by suggesting that the targeting of minority populations can be understood as having common features with the process through which communities move toward genocide. In one interview in the film, the creator of The Wire, David Simon asserts that “The drug war is a Holocaust in slow motion.”
The film also argues that the powerful are sustained by the “War on drugs,” politically through punitive populism and economically through wealth created as a result of the commercialization of criminal justice. The arguments that the film presents are familiar within critical criminology, concerned as they are with issues of power and inequality. However, the presentation of these arguments in an accessible, popular form is unusual, and Jarecki has intentionally crafted a space where such arguments can be articulated and heard by an audience outside of academia.
A number of methods are deployed in the film in order to convey the arguments. These include personal testimonies, expert statements, statistical intertitles and found footage. The personal testimonies are provided by people caught up in drugs and crime. This includes prisoners, family members, and professionals such as police, a prison manager, and a judge. These testimonies perform a function in deconstructing and challenging the conventional justifications for contemporary drug policies. The interviews with prisoners and family members move beyond the disembodied and voiceless representations described by Mason (1995) above. Instead, they reveal the problems of poverty, family dysfunction, and lack of opportunity that have shaped their destinies. As a result, they humanize these people and reveal the complexity and ambiguity of their circumstances. The interviews with criminal justice professionals serve to reveal the frustrations and futility of their work as they describe the unwinnable nature of the “War on drugs.” Together, the testimonies offer an account that is presented as a credible challenge to the legitimacy of current American policy and practice. However, these interviews also provide another function as they offer personal and poignant stories that attempt to touch the emotions of viewers; a critical element of reforming media (Garside, 2001; Gillespie, McLaughlin, Adams, & Symmonds, 2003).
The expert statements are offered by journalists and academics including Michelle Alexander, Carl Hart, Mark Mauer, and Richard Lawrence Miller. These statements provide an articulate and again credible voice to critical perspectives. The factual intertitles present statistics of immense size, with numbers that are shocking. For example:
Since 1971 the War on Drugs has cost over $1 trillion and resulted in more than 45 million arrests. … During that time, illegal drug use has remained unchanged. And Today 2.7 million children in America have a parent behind bars. … These children are more likely to be incarcerated during their lifetime than other children.
These factual titles are situated within personal stories, inviting the viewer to feel the depth of the issues as well as their almost unimaginable scale. Finally, the film draws upon found footage such as news images of antidrug films, civil rights campaigns, and political statements on drugs. These images are particularly important in providing a means to illuminate, contextualize, and question the historical roots of contemporary policy. In a sense, they provide a form of evidence for the arguments presented about the social origins of drug laws.
The documentary approaches deployed are used in order to convince and persuade the viewer. The content of the argument is polemic, drawing upon critical criminology, providing a stage for perspectives that are not prominent in mainstream debate. As a result, they are vulnerable to criticism and attack as extreme. The filmic techniques attempt to neutralize such criticisms. By drawing upon multiple perspectives, including criminal justice professionals and experts, the film presents itself as credible and reasonable, repositioning the arguments as accepted by knowledgeable, conventional, and mainstream people. The methods deployed also mix both factual material and emotional impact; informing and engaging the viewer. Of course, the film does take a particular perspective: The interviewees are deliberately selected, the facts are carefully chosen, and the film advocates rather than investigates. However, the documentary techniques are important in obscuring this and making the material digestible.
There is a question about who this film is aimed at, who are the intended audience? At the opening of the film, Jarecki explains how the film grew from his own experiences. He describes how his family came to America as Jewish refugees from Russia and Germany and how he grew up with a sense of responsibility to resist oppression. He also describes that his family employed a domestic helper, a Black woman called Nannie Jetter. He goes on to say that he knew Jetter’s family and over time saw them struggle with problems of drugs, poverty, and crime. From this it is possible to glean that Jarecki is simultaneously an outsider due to his migrant and ethnic background but also from a family of some wealth and power. By revealing his power and also his sense of responsibility, Jarecki is inviting the viewer to reflect upon and recognize their own power and responsibilities. This sense is reinforced later in the film, where he shows people, almost exclusively White people, in an urban street being interviewed about the “War on drugs.” The interviewees seem unaware of what is happening in their own country, and Jarecki’s voice-over explains that many people he asked thought that the “War on drugs” referred to action being taken in other countries. In this scene, Jarecki is confronting the viewer with their own lack of awareness; he is suggesting that many citizens, or viewers, are not aware of what is happening in their name. As the film closes, again Jarecki reminds viewers of his own sense of responsibility rooted in his family history and, by implication, reminds the viewer of their responsibilities. The audience for Jarecki appears to be people like him, people like those in the street scene: those with power and responsibility. It is not a grassroots film aimed at the revolutionary empowerment of those in the ghettos or in prison but is instead a liberal call to action for the middle classes.
The House I Live In is a fascinating film that attempts to present a critical perspective revealing the intersections of drugs, crime, poverty, and race. It is certainly to be applauded for its attempt to convey these arguments in a way that is digestible, persuasive, and emotionally engaging. However, the limitations of the film are in its appeal to the middle classes to take action. In doing so, it is essentially adopting a paternal, liberal approach, one that largely reinforces existing power structures rather than being concerned with grassroots empowerment, change from below, or radically redistributing power. Ultimately, the film is critical without being revolutionary.