SUN DANCE INSTITUTE Eugene Jarecki's The House I Live In Documents the Failure of the War on Drugs By: Keith Harten January 23, 2012 The United States has only five percent of the world's population; but five decades into the war on drugs, it has 25 percent of the world's prisoners — many of them convicted of nonviolent drug crimes. Despite huge numbers of drug- related incarcerations, illegal substances are cheaper, purer, and more widely available than ever. This begs the question: Why does the United States imprison so many of its citizens to so little effect? In his documentary The House I Live In, Eugene Jarecki examines the political and economical motivations behind the war on drugs. Jarecki documents how U.S. politicians — both liberal and conservative — gain political power by portraying drugs as a great evil facing America and then passing increasingly harsh laws that allow them to claim toughness on crime. Rather than solve the drug problem by addressing the economic and social factors contributing to drug abuse or even offering treatment to addicts, politicians have created public policies that promote higher numbers of arrests and mandate longer sentence EFTA01103686