-
Essay / The good versus the 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 stood out to me was that of the man who was currently in court for drug offenses, but also came from a long line of men in his family with a drug history. The interview sections with his father simply show that minority families with a history of drug dealings can easily find themselves in a never-ending cycle of incarceration. Although I found all the stories very moving, I will honestly say that there weren't any characters that I necessarily felt very close to, but I liked Nanny's story and found the choice of the narrator's family to "help" Nanny. and ends up having a negative impact on his own family. It was very sad to see that she was just trying to do something to help her family financially, but ended up making things worse. On the contrary, I think this film completely changes the viewers' perception of "good" and "bad" because it shows the "good" and "bad" to each of the types of people that you might have preconceived ideas about. . Say no to plagiarism. . Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay For example, you may go into the movie thinking that all the people in prison for drugs are "bad guys," but you learn the ridiculousness of their sentence and the consequences they face for just interacting with drugs. Conversely, you might think of judges or police officers as "the good guys," who dispense justice for the good of the country, but the film also shows the darker sides of these roles. We see a judge having to respect the laws of Congress and morally sentence a man, against his will, to at least twenty years in prison. We see and hear about police officers profiting more from drug busts than from solving murder cases. Mentioning the Iowa judge again, his story surprised me somewhat. At first glance, it seems that this judge is happily handing out prison sentences left and right; Then we hear an interview with him and it's revealed that while he doesn't think the length of the sentence is fair, the law of Congress trumps his own judgment. I would say the biggest story that surprised me was more of a reflection on the story in the middle of the film. The part of the film where it explains how, over time, society (the predominantly white part of society) has attached certain drugs to minority groups in order to prevent them from "threatening" 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 describes the criminal justice system and the war on drugs. According to Boundless, conflict theory is defined as “society should not be understood as a complex system struggling for balance, but rather as a competition. Society is made up of individuals competing for limited resources. Broader social structures and organizations reflect competition for resources in their inherent inequalities; some people and organizations have more and use these resources to maintain their position of power in society. (Unlimited, 2016). Based on this definition, this sounds quite similar to how I view the war on drugs, in contrast to structural-functionalism "a sociological theory that attempted to.