The House I Live In: War on Drugs and Mass Incarceration

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Main body
Summary

Introduction

Americas War on Drugs has been going on for decades, yet the victories seem to be mostly against the countrys own population. While drug accessibility did not become any lower since the 1960s and the 1970s, the rates and terms of incarceration for drug-related offenses skyrocketed during the same time period. A 2012 documentary, The House I Live In, goes as far as comparing this mass incarceration to the Holocaust and not without grounds. Just as the final solution of the Jewish question, incarceration fuelled by the War on Drugs is massive in scale, serves to provide the economy with cheap labor, and disproportionally targets a single minority.

Main body

One reason why a documentary about enforcing drug-related legislation begins with the images of the Holocaust is that the War on Drugs is also an example of incarceration on a truly massive scale. Although there may be no definite agreement on the numbers, it is common knowledge that Nazi Germany confined dozens of millions of people to its prisons and concentration camps during the 12 years of its existence. The War on Drugs has a score to match according to the film, 45 million people have been imprisoned for drug-related offenses since its beginning. Despite having only 5 percent of the worlds population, the USA accounts for roughly a quarter of its inmates, a considerable proportion of whom are casualties of the War on Drugs.

Apart from the mere scale, there is another similarity between the Holocaust and the mass incarceration due to the war or drugs its essentiality for the economy. The unpaid labor of inmates in the concentration camps fuelled Hitlers military machine and Germanys economy. In a similar vein, the prison-industrial complex enjoys the benefit of the convicts cheap labor to make itself more competitive. Moreover, the prisons and jails themselves provide employment for staff. At one point, the film notes that, if not for the Joseph Harp Correctional Center, the residents of the nearby town of Lexington, Oklahoma, would have little job opportunity.

Yet the way in which the comparison between the Holocaust and the War on Drugs makes the most sense is the fact that mass incarceration for drug-related offenses disproportionally targets one group of population. Much like Jews in Nazi Germany, African Americans have been consistently associated with societal problems, namely, the drug trade and abuse. It began in the 1950s when cocaine was stereotyped as a jazzmans drug and was further reinforced in the 1980s when crack cocaine became largely associated with poor black neighborhoods. The film calls this association the identification, when a group of people is labeled as the cause of societal issues. It also suggests that the phases of ostracism and outright confiscation of both rights and property are likely to follow. There is evidence of this in the case of black Americans being disproportionally arrested and sentenced for drug-related offenses. Thus, the documentary concludes its comparison between the Nazi Holocaust and the War on Drugs by showing how they lead to a gradual dehumanization of a given group in public discourse.

Summary

To summarize, The House I Live In highlights the unsavory parallels between the Holocaust and the mass incarceration fuelled by Americas War on Drugs. Much like the policies of Nazi Germany, incarceration for drug-related offenses hits dozens of millions and serves an economic purpose by supplying free or near-free labor. Yet the greatest similarity is the association of the drug problem with the black population that leads to their gradual dehumanization as a demographic with potentially dreadful consequences.

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The House I Live In: War on Drugs and Mass Incarceration

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