The House I Live In Documentary Analysis

(38) – The film The House I live in, is an extraordinary film that gives light to one of the biggest problem in the United States, and that problem is the war on drugs and how such creates sociological problems such as mass incarceration. Throughout the duration of this documentary, a Correctional Officer by the name of Mike Carpenter is interviewed and gives his opinions on the ideologies governing our society. He strongly believes, that people in prison are paying for the fear that we as Americans have created over the years. In my interpretation, what Officer Carpenter is trying to get to is basically this whole idea of blaming those who are inferior. The war on drugs created the impression in our society, that those responsible for many of our problems were young African Americans; what did we do in return?

The idea of blaming those in prison for our fears, in my opinion, tie back to some of the ideas described in Racial Domination, Racial Progress the Sociology of Race in America, when the authors Matthew Desmond & Mustafa Emirbayer describe the creation of ghettos and other sociological terms such as white privilege. If we take into consideration ghettos, prisons in the United States are the exact same thing, they house hundreds of individuals who at one point had low possibilities of success due to the current system that thrives in the U.S; the term white privilege in my opinion, can also be used to describe what I stated earlier of blaming the inferior. Whiteness is an important sociological tool, therefore by having whiteness, those who are fortunate enough have the ability to express their fears and indicate who the responsible individuals for those fears