Watch The House I Live In For Free

One of the wrost movies I have ever seen

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

This sobering documentary is a must-see film certainly by all Americans and the rest of the world as well. We see how (now illegal) drugs were sold and used in pharmacies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There is excellent historical footage and documents, not to mention stories from those who were deeply affected, simply by their poverty level or the colour of their skin. Ronald Reagan, despite waging the "war on Drugs", made the entire situation much worse and ignored statistics. Throughout the film, we follow the narrator through his personal experiences as well as the drug issue on a wide-scale, looking into prisons and how the system is completely prejudicial. A VERY important film.

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.

This outstanding documentary is being shown across the nation in prisons, watched by guards and inmates. Including inmates, prison officials, and scholars of corrections, this documentary is riveting. It exposes what mandatory sentencing for drug use and sale, victimless crimes, has done to fill our prisons and promote expansion and privatization. It is an excellent companion piece to Michelle Alexander's outstanding book, The New Jim Crow. Its findings show the personal impact of the US having one of the largest prison populations in the world and paying $24,000 per inmate to incarcerate rather than funding programs, including job training, and policies including a higher minimum wage and changing sentencing so that victimless crimes do not net a felony conviction, that would help offenders function in the outside world. It is a must see!

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.