jason-leonidas1984 This needs to be seen by every law officer, every judge, every college student and beyond. This is a VERY powerful documentary that doesn't just paint a black and white picture telling us that drugs are acceptable or that drugs are bad, it talks about the HUNDREDS of elements which make up the complex drug and prison system we know of today. Some of the top minds in the industry on both sides give the best and most insightful talks, this has really been an eye opening film for me.I wish I could mass produce this DVD for free and mail it to every citizen of the US. We need to change this system, it's broken and heading down a very scary path. Most people think that drugs and prisons don't affect them so why bother with the issue, you couldn't be any more wrong. Thousands of times a day the authorities are searching people and seizing property without due process, many times never finding anything. A man was killed after a raid and nothing was found. This IS RELEVANT TO ALL CITIZENS OF America. The Constitution is our savings grace, don't let it burn to ash along with your freedom. Please watch this, even if you don't agree with everything, I feel like you can still learn something and apply it to your community and the ballet box to make a positive change in the right direction.

Rafael Cortina Eugene Jarecki was a Caucasian boy who thought critically about the struggles of his family's black employee and later, as a grown man, why exactly his life turned out so differently than her sons'. Jarecki is the filmmaker of "The House I Live In", a poignant documentary that shines a big bright discerning light into the shadows of America's "War on Drugs." Within the opening chapters of the film, he voluntarily empties his pockets, disarms us, and identifies his proximity and interest in the topic.Professor after Intellect, Prison Guard after Police Officer, stories unfold and cold hard empirical statistics enforce the cyclical nature of class, race, poverty and crime. Heartbreaking accounts of systematic inequities are detailed from in the prison cell and outside. From behind the court bench and below it. Jarecki's storytelling is artful and slightly waxing poetical—in an effective manner I might add. He utilizes monologues in the film to humanize the numbers we see and discussions we hear with criminals we come to know over the course of the film; the same criminals we ultimately sympathize with by the end. Do not get me wrong, this is not a straight up "world against them" diatribe. David Simon, the man behind HBO's the Wire, has a number of well spoken and intelligent insights. He tells us, "what drugs haven't destroyed, the war against them has." This statement is referring to the futile attempt at eradicating drugs from the U.S. for the last 30 years. More black men are going through the legal system (prison, parole, and prosecution) than there were slaves in America 200 years ago. The film indicates a strongly biased machine that affects the entire lower class, but disproportionately the black population. Near the conclusion of the documentary Simon suggests the "War on Drugs" as a major factor contributing to the cyclical nature of social class. Although never uttered on screen, in many accounts it is implicit that the "War on Drugs" has also been a proponent of racism; the suppression and oppression of the minority populations in America. "The House I Live In" is a well groomed film. Very little fat and a lot of substance. Easily the most thorough screen analysis of America's current socioeconomic situation that I have discovered to date. This should be the "Super Size Me", the catalyst, for discussions around class in our country. Unfortunately, the same dominant system and mentality that works against many subjects in the film, does not appear to be concerned with fixing what is broken. Bronx drug dealer Shanequa Benitez tells us, "They view you as, 'damn you live over there?' But they don't bother to ask, 'damn was it your choice?'" With a jaded resolve Benitez points out the irony in the questions we typically ask regarding social issues. See for yourself if Jarecki is asking the right ones.

valis1949 THE HOUSE I LIVE IN (dir. Eugene Jarecki) America has more of its citizens behind bars than in any other nation on the planet, and we presently have more Blacks incarcerated than were slaves in the Confederate States of America during the 1850's. And, America's misguided approach to the issue of illegal drugs is the single most important reason why so many of us are in prison. These are only a couple of startling revelations from Eugene Jarecki's riveting documentary about America's terribly misguided War On Drugs. Clearly we have chosen to solve a health issue by creating a ridiculous legal and political policy based on an oxymoron called, 'the criminal justice system'. Racial scapegoating and a system based on 'prisons for profit' have allowed us to spend billions, yet more people use illegal drugs today than when the drug war first began. And, the quality of these drugs is infinitely superior. No one, not the authorities or the criminals, seem to be satisfied with the status quo, and readily admit that the whole affair is an abject failure. But, the film shows how this suicidal social policy remains locked in place with no end in sight. Politicians campaign on making this nation drug free, and addiction rates soar and we can't seem to build jails quickly enough to fill them.If there was ever a solution that was immeasurably worse than the problem, it is The War On Drugs. ABSOLUTE MUST SEE

winst If you've been a student of most public schools you've learned about slavery.There's a lyric I remember that says "I hate it when they tell us how far we came to be - as if our peoples' history started with slavery." Well, the history of subjugating minorities has not ENDED with slavery either, and retrospective condemnation of racism serves the purpose to perpetuate the racism embedded and invested in our country today. The most important mistake is to confuse failure with success in regards to the apparent shortcomings of our establishment. I again use the example of public schools because the recent documentary "Waiting for Superman" did a fantastic job in addressing the "failures" of schools to educate children. It takes a book like James Lowen's Lies My Teacher Told Me to recognize the grand success of our school's indoctrination process: to teach obedience, not intelligence. It takes a documentary like The House I Live In to vocalize the airtight success of our administration in conducting the 41 years' drug war. Logic should compute. If more money has been spent (a trillion dollars since the '70s,) the prison population has skyrocketed (2.4 million people incarcerated) and no progress has been made in keeping drugs off the streets, (similarly with our schools, with reform after reform we continue to perform beneath the feet of most industrialized countries,) you have to start looking at things a little differently. It is hard to see the exit of the maze when walking within its walls. This documentary helps to see things from the outside. This film brings to light a lot of revealing facts that have been swept under the rug, like how opium wasn't an issue until Chinese started climbing the success latter in San Francisco, or how the police in border states can directly siphon the money from drug busts to reward their outfit. Mostly, it encourages a comparison between the way minorities have been apprehended with drug abuse and the apprehension of whites (who hold equal if not higher drug abuse statistics but make up a minority of the prison population.) And it encourages comparison between past, mass scale subjugation (often with eventual extermination) and, to quote the film, the slow-motion holocaust happening in our own country. It recognizes the drug epidemic as an economic issue and a medical issue, not a racial issue. It recognizes the drug WAR as the glaring rash of vibrant racism, and the brutal front of a class war in a society where profits come first, human beings second. More to this point, it eludes to the country's prime motivation, net gain and increased GDP, and the plethora of companies from Sprint Mobile to GM to privatized prisons such as CCA, all of whom depend on the drug war to maintain stock value. To quote ousted investigative journalist and ex-LAPD narcotics officer Michael Ruppert, "A snake eating its own tail is not nutritious." Though it is outside the periphery of the film's focus and beyond the pale even for a documentary of this substance, the issue of international drug trafficking, and facilitation it has received, at times, from both the financial sector and intelligence agency of our country, was never brought to light in this film. Despite whether this topic is to be written off as conspiracy theory or submitted for further analysis, a film that introduces our economy's dependence on drug dependence and the targeting of minorities in an everlasting drug war, has a duty to at least address the controversy. I suggest raising the question on discussion boards and at Q&As, as my screening was lucky enough to have. We live in a country that is infested with racism, now as much as any other time. Our economy depends on it, and the drug war has fertilized it. It is time to end it.