Pubdate: Fri, 26 Oct 2012 Source: Austin American-Statesman (TX) Copyright: 2012 Mcclatchy tribune News Service Contact: http://www.statesman.com/default/content/feedback/lettersubmit.html Website: http://www.statesman.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/32 Author: Roger Moore Note: rating: Unrated, drug abuse, language. running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes. theater: Arbor. DRUG-WAR FILM HURT BY PERSONAL DETOUR Strong case for new approach weakened by contrived link to director's life. "The House I Live In" is an ambitious documentary about the real object of the war on drugs, and the real results of it. Director Eugene Jarecki offers proof and expert testimony that traces the war to efforts to isolate an activity of America's counterculture, an effort that turned into wars against entire communities. Jarecki makes a pretty good case, because the evidence - that cocaine became a criminal justice obsession at a time of rising black ambitions in the U.S., that marijuana became demonized only with the rise of Latin culture in the U.S. - is there. The payoff has been an endless war that's gutted communities and turned police into drug-money seeking bounty hunters. Jarecki follows cops from Miami to New Mexico and sees how their work has been perverted and their community standing eroded by civil liberty violations that have come with the "get tough on drugs" emphasis. Jarecki builds the trail of evidence from Richard Nixon's politically savvy but idealistic war that included generous funding for rehabilitation, to Ronald Reagan and other presidents' posturing over the issue. Millions are spent for more prison cells, and Jarecki reinforces those statistics with others - 1.7 million U.S. children "now have a parent in prison." Neighborhoods riven by police sweeps and small-time arrests lose businesses, schools fail, families collapse and a cycle of failure forms. Jarecki follows the case of a 24-year-old who is having the book thrown at him for a relatively minor infraction, tracks down the kids' junkie father, and meets a judge who is speaking out against these politically motivated sentencing guidelines. Where his film fails is in Jarecki's attempts to tie himself and his well-off family to the tale. We meet Nannie Jeter, the woman who raised him, and hear Jarecki wonder why some of her black working-class family wound up dead or in trouble. And we go "duh" when Nannie Jeter tells us, and him, that she was too busy raising the Jarecki kids in a distant city and not raising her own. Jarecki's film makes some great points, but he undercuts his arguments with that precious tale-of two-families hook that he hangs this film on. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom