In the documentary The House I Live In, filmmaker Eugene Jarecki caputres the emotional, societal, and human repercussions of the four-decade failed war on drugs. The film follows the consequences of the drug war into people’s homes, and provides faces and imagery for harrowing statistics: The U.S. holds 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, including 500,000 Americans convicted for nonviolent drug offenses. Meanwhile, drug police enforcement has marginalized hundreds of thousands of Americans, while drug use has remained virtually the same since President Nixon formally launched the war.

Jarecki’s film puts faces and stories to a drug war that has affected all corners of the criminal justice system and has disproportionately hurt poor black communities. The many chapters of contraband laws, Jarecki commented to ThinkProgress and chronicles in his film, “act as a thinly veiled force for racial and social control.” One surprising aspect of The House I Live In is how far the disappointment and frustration reaches, from inmates and their families and friends, to dispirited police officers, prison guards, and judges. We spoke with Jarecki about The House I Live In, which won the grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and is now playing in theaters. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What was one of the most surprising thing you discovered when researching and creating the film?

Probably the hidden humanity from inside a machine. That’s really at the end of the day the discovery over and over that makes for interesting cinema in making a move like this. You approach a gigantic machine from the outside and what you know of it is very little and what you see is evidence qualities and it’s evident qualities in our system of mass incarceration is that it’s a vast faceless predatory cannibal that eats human beings for its own perpetuation. So from the outside that’s all I knew and of course that produces the impression that from the inside you’ll find people who are faceless, predatory animals.

And of course then you get inside and there’s these people everywhere who are a stone throw from yourself and are on the inside because they’re locked inside or are on the inside because their job has them locked inside with those who are locked inside. and you find over and over again that the people inside are people who are like yourself.

Why is this issue so understated?

When you live in the public and live with this monolithic impression of this institution you assume faceless and you go back to bed assuming that all is well. So it’s only if by some chance an American comes into contact with the prison system because, god forbid, someone they know or love gets caught up in it or they themselves become an addict, or they themselves have an experience that exposes them to it and they awaken.

When I went into this prison system, I thought I’d be able to see it from the outside and see what was wrong with it. What you see from outside is superficial and frankly what you see from outside is true of many prison systems in the world. Ours is unique in that we have and industrialized system of mass incarceration. Not a lot of our western allies have such a thing. what we have is so widespread with 2.3 million people behind bars, 45 million arrests over 40 years and a trillion dollars have made us the world’s largest jailer. On the other side of that is so many people we incarcerate for long periods are nonviolent.

We’ve had many chapters of contraband laws in America to act as a thinly veiled force for racial and social control and we saw that historically and yet something that happened in the modern era that was different and profound that was the declaration of war on drugs by Richard Nixon in 1971. When he did that all the problems that accompany war emerged in this otherwise sort of adhoc dynamic of the occasional drug law that occasionally would put particularly Chinese immigrants away to jail because of opium or particularly harass Mexican Americans who might be a threat to U.S. jobs.

Now all the problems that accompany war emerged in this otherwise sort of ad hoc dynamic of the occasional drug law that occasionally would put particularly Chinese immigrants away to jail because of opium or particularly harass Mexican Americans who might be a threat to U.S. jobs. What we find in the modern era is that war is declared. And of course what does war bring, it brings industrial complexes like the military industrial complex. It brings vested interest, it brings the potential for tremendous profit, it brings the potential to convert risk into profit, fear into profit. That’s what wars do. And wars get perpetuated by the dynamic between fear and profit whether it’s economic profit or political profit varies from time to time. In the drug war it’s both. you have short sighted politicians seeking short term gain from the political profit of appearing tough on crime.
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This week, NASCAR’s Dale Earnhardt Jr. put a new face on the concussion crisis that is hammering professional sports but has, so far, been largely limited to football. Earnhardt, one of the most recognizable racecar drivers in the world, announced that he would sit out at least two races due to concussion-related injuries, raising concerns from at least one retired driver that Earnhardt’s injury may actually be career threatening.

SB Nation’s Jeff Gluck wrote a great piece about the proliferation of concussions in stock car racing and the inner battles drivers can face when they suffer head trauma due to crashes. What stood out to me more than anything in Gluck’s piece, though, was this quote from Jeff Gordon, another of the sport’s biggest names:

“Honestly, I hate to say this, but I wouldn’t (admit it),” he said. “If I have a shot at the championship and there are two races to go and my head is hurting and I just came through a wreck…I’m not going to say anything. I’m sorry. That’s the competitor in me and many other guys.

“That’s to a fault. That’s not the way it should be, but it’s something most of us would do. I think that’s what gets a lot of us in trouble.”

Gordon’s response isn’t much different from NFL players who have said they would lie about and play through concussions, since injuries are a known risk in football. But Gordon’s answer is more problematic.

If an NFL player elects to return to the field after suffering a concussion, the risks aren’t small. Another hit suffered on top of a concussion that hasn’t been treated can even be deadly. But on the most simple level, the player’s decision, as bad as it may be, really only affects himself, and other players aren’t necessarily at an immediate risk of injury because he chooses to play.

In NASCAR, where the drivers are manipulating 3,400-pound cars inches apart from each other at nearly 200 miles per hour, that isn’t the case. A driver who isn’t sharp, whose reaction time is slowed by even a tenth of a second, is an immediate risk to every other driver on the track. That makes the risks of a driver getting back into the car while he or she is still suffering from brain trauma inherently more dangerous to the sport’s other participants than a football player who makes the same decision.

I don’t fault Gordon for his response any more than I fault Troy Polamalu for his. Professional athletics is a culture that demands winning, and from football to NASCAR, it’s a culture that rewards participants who “tough it out” and play through injuries. But that culture needs to change. The on-track death of Earnhardt Jr.’s iconic father sparked immediate investigations into how NASCAR could make its sport safer. The awareness being raised by Earnhardt Jr.’s concussions should lead to a similar level of introspection.

I’m unsure about the voiceover used to sell the movie, but I remain pretty excited for Zero Dark Thirty, in part because of its focus on the role of female intelligence operatives. I’d have a proclivity for these kinds of stories in the first place, and it doesn’t hurt that, as Eli Lake recently recounted in a great feature for Newsweek on women and espionage, is actually an accurate reflection of how the hunt for bin Laden went down:

The most human moment in the trailer may be Chris Pratt asking Joel Edgerton “What part convinced you?” and Edgerton’s deadpan response, “Her confidence.” It’s a relatively new thing, this idea that we could trust women to give orders to men in uniform, and all of a sudden, we’ve got a lot of fascinating female intelligence operatives playing with that tension and those questions about reliability. In the current iteration of the James Bond movies, M stands for mother, to a certain extent, with Bond breaking into her apartment and playing fast and loose with her orders in a classic display of rebellious boundary-testing. On Homeland, Carrie Mathison is meant to seem unreliable because of her mental illness and the way it interacts with her gender, influencing her affairs with both David Estes, her boss, and Nicholas Brody, her target. But the show doubles up the reasons she shouldn’t be trusted, and then proves her right anyway. Now, Jessica Chastain, who doesn’t actually speak a word in this trailer, presented in profile, eyes huge or utterly obscured, is being presented as the person on whose shoulders the mission to get Osama bin Laden rested. That cleaving of the requirement that expertise be validated by machoness if not explicitly by gender, even by emotional stoicism, is fascinating and important. These are big, tense, horrible things the intelligence community sets into motion. And women seem to be the ones expressing the weight of that knowledge, and those decisions.

I was rewatching The League in preparation for the new season, which started last night, and because my amazing-on-paper fantasy team has been underperforming and I needed a pick-me-up, and I started thinking again about the show’s gender politics. The League is probably the show I watch regularly and deeply enjoy with the highest rate of characters saying terrible things about or doing bad things to the women in their lives (Game of Thrones is a serious competitor). But while I think Game of Thrones is, and will continue to be, long-term, an exploration of the cancerous impact of sanctioned violent misogyny on society, The League is rather different: it’s a story about basically likable men who say bad things about women or do bad things to women largely out of fear or venality. Sexism less looms big than it makes them look small.

Perhaps the best example of this is Shivakamini Somakandarkram, the high school valedictorian in the same graduating class as the male members of the League. The League absolutely objectifies Shiva: an awkward picture of her from high school adorns the League’s championship trophy. Her name is invoked as if she’s some kind of exotic goddess, which is particularly gross and othering given her South Asian heritage. In last night’s episode, Jenny MacArthur, the League’s sole female member, even fantasized about a sexual encounter with Shiva while her husband was away on a pre-season visit to the Dallas Cowboys training camp. In almost any other show, this kind of behavior would be gross beyond belief.

But the League’s doing something careful with Shiva’s character, namely revealing that the League’s memories of her and the idol they’ve built her up to be have nothing to do with her actual person. Far from being a hopeless, awkward nerd, Shiva’s grown up to be a beautiful, accomplished urologist—in fact, she’s probably matured more and better than any of her high school classmates, who for some reason cling to the high school vision of her as if it remains a reality. We learn over the course of the show that even though the League treats Shiva like she was a weird object of study in high school, she at least played an important role in the life of Kevin MacArthur, Jenny’s husband: he lost his virginity to her. Their memories of Shiva aren’t true to who she is now, or what she was to them then.

And the show has progressively reinforced the gap between who the members of the League make Shiva out to be and who the audience at home knows her to be. The first season brought the reveal that she had grown up gorgeous and smart, and that Andre, a member of the League, was dating her. The second brought the news about her prior relationship with Kevin. In the third season, her appearance brought about Ruxin’s miraculous recovery after a stroke, a scene that reveled how inappropriate and irritating the League’s fetishization of her is when Ruxin planted a series of kisses on her after he recovered his inability to walk. And in an upcoming episode this season, Shiva tells Ruxin directly how irritating she finds her presence on the League’s trophy and directly asks him to remove it. Things don’t go as planned, of course, Ruxin being Ruxin, but it’s nice to see Shiva call the League’s behavior out for what it is. The League has made the case that Shiva would be a pretty awesome person to have around, in the flesh and on the regular if only the members of the League could be mature enough to know her as a person, rather than as a fading photograph and a silly myth.

I was gritting my teeth waiting for a question, any question, to be asked about reproductive health, contraception, insurance coverage for women’s health, or sexual assault at last night’s debate. So I was glad that moderator Martha Raddatz asked about abortion. But I was less than thrilled with how she phrased the question, asking Vice President Biden and Rep. Paul Ryan “I would like to ask you both to tell me what role your religion has played in your own personal views on abortion. Please talk about how you came to that decision. Talk about how your religion played a part in that. And, please, this is such an emotional issue for so many people in this country, please talk personally about this, if you could.” As Irin Carmon pointed out at Salon, it was a framing that put the issue on turf where religious conservatives like to have it, that posited the beliefs of two men, neither of whom will ever have to face the prospect of themselves carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term, was more important than the experiences of women, and that personalized a debate with important policy implications. So here are five questions Raddatz could asked to get, meaningfully, at any of the factors her question excluded:

1. Have either of you had a personal experience with a woman who was deciding whether or not to end a pregnancy? If so, what did you learn from her decision-making process? And how has that experience affected your views about what policy changes are necessary to ensure safe access to medical care for women and support for women who choose to raise children they might not have otherwise carried to term?

2. If you believe abortion should be illegal except in cases of rape, incest, or where the life or health of the mother is at risk, how would you enforce a ban on abortions performed for other reasons? What sentences would doctors who performed abortions or women who solicited them have to serve if found guilty of violating the ban? How would you fund enforcement mechanisms?

3. Congressman Ryan, would you support comprehensive sex education and free access to barrier contraceptives as a means to lower the rate of unplanned pregnancies and abortions that result from those pregnancies? What incentive programs do you think it would be appropriate for state or non-state actors to offer women to encourage them to carry even unwanted pregnancies to term? What support programs would you provide that don’t exist now or which existing programs would you enhance or expand to aid women who carry through pregnancies they might otherwise have terminated?
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