The Good Versus Bad in The War on Drugs in The Film The House I Live in

For me, the entire film was extremely eye opening and informative. One of the stories that stuck out to me was the man who was currently in court for drug violations, but also came from a long line of men in his family with a history of drugs. The sections of interviews with his father just goes to show that minority families with history of drug relations can easily end up in a never ending cycle of incarceration. While I found all of the stories very moving, I will honestly say that there were not any characters that I necessarily felt very close to, but I liked the story of Nanny and I found it interesting how the narrator’s family’s choice to “help” Nanny out, ending up impacting her own family in a negative way. It was very sad to see that she was just trying to do something to help out her family financially, but in the end ending up making matters turn for the worse. If anything, I think this film completely changes viewers perception of “good guys” vs “bad guys” because it shows the “good” and “bad” to each of the types of people you may have preconceived notions about.

For example, you may go into the film thinking all people in jail for drugs are “bad guys”, but you learn about the ridiculousness of their sentence and the consequences they have to face for just interacting with drugs. Reversely, you may see judges or police officers as “the good guys”, dealing out justice for the good of the country, but the film also shows the darker sides to these roles. We watch a judge have to follow congress laws and morally unwillingly sentence a man to at least twenty years in jail. We see and hear about police officers who are profiting off of drug busts more than those solving murder cases. Mentioning the judge from Iowa again, his story somewhat surprised me. At first, it seems that this judge is happily doling out prison sentences left and right; then we hear an interview with him and it is revealed that as much as he doesn’t think the sentence time is fair, congress law overrides his own judgement. I would say the biggest story that surprised me was more of a reflection on history in the middle of the film. The part in the film where it is explained how over time, society (the predominantly white part of society) attached certain drugs to minority groups in order to keep them from “threatening” the white people, was extremely interesting; How drugs were used as a social weapon against minorities.

I will definitely say that I think conflict theory best described the criminal justice system and the war on drugs. According to Boundless, conflict theory is defined as “society is not best understood as a complex system striving for equilibrium but rather as a competition. Society is made up of individuals competing for limited resources. Broader social structures and organizations reflect the competition for resources in their inherent inequalities; some people and organizations have more and use those resources to maintain their positions of power in society. (Boundless, 2016). Based on this definition, it sounds pretty similar to how I view the war on drugs, unlike structural-functionalism “a sociological theory that originally attempted to explain social institutions as collective means to meet individual biological needs (originally just functionalism).” (Boundless, 2016). I don’t think that the criminal justice system or the war on drugs really is “for the greater good” ultimately. I understand the good intentions, but I definitely think that it is a system that has transformed into a bit of a witch hunt. It is a system that has built itself on systematic/ institutional racism. You could argue that yes drugs and the system has also incarcerated people of all races, but it is also a system favoring the rich over the poor. Boundless had a great example of conflict theory exemplified through the following example: “Thus, while the function of education is to educate the workforce, it also has built into it an element of conflict and inequality, favoring one group (the wealthy) over other groups (the poor)” (Boundless, 2016). This completely ties in with the war on drugs because the people profiting from the whole war on drugs are the not the people whose “lives are being changed through prison”, but those profiting off the business of it all. People who are put in jail for drugs most likely came to it as a last resource due to poverty.