Original subtitles

I, your host of "independent lens."

We keep electing officials who are tough on crime,

but is being tough the same as being smart?

For 40 years, America has waged a war against illegal narcotics.

The drug war has resulted in our jailing more citizens

than any other country in the world.

Yet drugs are cheaper and more available than ever before.

What went wrong?

Man: Of the 2,600 people I've sent to federal prison,

I've seen 3 or 4 kingpins.

We're incarcerating poor people who are drug addicts.

Tucci: Independent film director Eugene jerecki

gained unprecedented access to dealers, cops, jailers, judges,

and elected officials.

He captured Americans caught in a system

that nearly everyone agrees does more harm than good.

The industry of incarceration has become addicted

to the drug war, profiting from a steady diet of new prisoners.

Every war has casualties.

How do we protect American citizens

and our lauded system of justice from becoming collateral damage?

"The house I live in" next.

Announcer: This program is made possible by

the corporation for public broadcasting,

the national endowment for the arts,

and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

Man: My family came to America fleeing persecution in Europe.

For my mom's parents, it was the pogroms of Russia

in which thousands of Jews died.

For my dad, it was Hitler, the creation of ghettos

and the final solution that killed millions.

As children, my brothers and I were taught

that we were the lucky ones who made it out.

But with that luck came a responsibility.

"Never again" didn't just mean that people like us

shouldn't suffer;

It meant others shouldn't suffer either.

Going to join me here.

Won't you be seated, please, ladies and gentlemen.

Come, on, doctor, try to fit in.

Mr. [indistinct] Mr. [indistinct]

Fine. All right.

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to summarize for you

the meeting that I have just had with bipartisan leaders.

America's public enemy number 1 in the United States

is drug abuse.

Uh, gold teeth, big, in his 30s,

and he wears, like, a turban on his head.

Louis and the crew.

[Car alarm]

[Indistinct radio transmission]

Keep in mind that school is going to let these students out

in 15 minutes.

Man: The discrepancy measures the distance by and which

we have not yet attained democracy

in these United States.

Sure, we've got problems over this nation.

But never forget, there's nothing wrong with America today

that a good election won't cure.

[Cheering]

You go right up Charles street, right?

Go past the light.

Ronald Reagan: That's why I believe

the tide of battle has turned

and we're beginning to win the crusade for a drug free America.

Man: What shame that we American people

could so act and be so nonunderstanding.

[Indistinct radio transmission]

Man: Ok, be alert, kid.

Man: If he doesn't put you in jail, wonderful.

Nobody with any sense likes to go to jail,

but if he puts you in jail, you go in that jail

and transform it from a dungeon of shame

to a haven of freedom and human dignity.

[Cheering]

Man: All of us must overcome the crippling legacy

of bigotry and injustice.

Obama: Let all those who have wondered if America's beacon

still burns as bright, tonight we've proved once more

that the true spirit of our nation

comes from the enduring power of our ideals...

democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.

Woman: My name is nannie jeter.

I was born in crewe, Virginia, a very small town.

Coming north, I feel that I would prove

that I was gonna conquer everything

that needed to be conquered.

Narrator: Nannie jeter was like a second mother to me.

Though she started out working for my family,

she was never a nannie.

Nannie is actually her name.

Man: � ...Left in church on Sunday morning �

nannie: They just have some of everything.

[Man singing indistinctly]

Tonight is a celebration night.

Narrator: Our families were close,

and her children and grandchildren

were my playmates growing up.

Hi, my precious! You hungry?

But was we got older, I saw many of them struggling

with poverty, joblessness, crime, and worse.

Newscaster: President Obama has an advantage,

but it's still very, very early in this night.

Oh...

Narrator: When I asked nannie what she thought

might have gone wrong,

her answer was surprisingly simple.

Nannie: I think drugs.

Drugs is the monster.

The killing, the stealing,

there's people being destroyed.

It's devastating.

What happened to my son with drugs,

I would love to change that.

Man: Drugs in America.

Pollsters have identified that

as the number 1 issue in this country.

Woman: Taking drugs in growing numbers.

Man: Doctors find out he has taken an overdose of crack.

Woman: The battle to control the drug market is deadly.

Man: Most of the victims are young blacks who live...

Narrator: To understand what drugs had done

to nannie jeter's family and others like it,

I wanted to get out on the road to talk to people.

Woman: I know firsthand the devastation

we as a family have had to endure because of the drugs.

Been here before my kids, been here before my mom,

my sister, my dad.

I had 2 kids, and I lost them to the streets

because of my own problems.

Narrator: Time and again, I learned

how one person's struggle had grown into a crisis

for their family and the community.

By a show of hands, how many people here

had any kind of drug involvement on why they're in here?

I'm in here for selling drugs.

I have a life and 30-year sentence.

I killed a guy back in 1984.

Narrator: How'd that happen?

I just... dope and out of my head,

and I wound up shooting a guy in the mouth and killed him.

Narrator: But as I began to look around,

the very real problems associated with drug abuse

began to seem just 1 part of an even larger problem

facing the country.

Man: It's absolutely true

that drugs have destroyed lives,

that heroin and cocaine, for example,

do nothing to engender individual dignity.

But while covering the drug war as a journalist

for more than a decade, I came to understand

that what drugs hadn't destroyed,

the war against them has.

Freeze!

Man: The war against drugs is heating up.

Simon: Somebody down the road said we're gonna fight war

against illicit drugs because drugs are bad.

Ok, there's no argument there.

But think about where we are 30 years later.

You know, if you look at all the money spent on drug enforcement,

on prisons, on probation officers,

judges, narcotics agents, on interdiction,

and everything else that is expanded due to war on drugs,

it gratifies us.

It makes us feel like we're tough on crime.

Put 'em away. Put 'em away where they belong.

Simon: But to what end?

We are the jailingest country on the planet

beyond Saudi Arabia, China, or Russia.

Nobody jails their population at the rate that we do,

and yet drugs are purer than before,

they're more available.

There are younger and younger kids

willing to sell them.

It would be one thing if it was draconian and it worked,

but it's draconian and it doesn't work.

It just leads to more.

[Siren]

Weed?

[Indistinct chatter]

Making it work for the old men.

I'm gonna really... They gave all of that.

Shanequa: I'm not a big, super drug dealer,

yeah. Yeah, I got some weed, so...

I do what I have to do.

I know how to survive.

You know, this and that if I have to.

It's not hard to tell that these are the junkies, right?

Man: Hey, get out of here with that!

I think the economy thrives with the drug money.

We got judges that's getting high, too.

We've got cops that's sniffing coke.

We got people with good, white, college eyes

that can afford to have it, and that's the only difference.

Yeah, the boys is behind us. The boys is behind us.

When I think about people living in inner-city neighborhoods,

they live off the principle of equality of life chances.

You should not be able to enter a hospital ward

in an inner-city hospital of newborn babies

and predict with near certainty

on the basis of their class, background, and race

where these kids, where these healthy newborn babies

are gonna end up in life.

Shanequa: The dope block. That's what this is.

77 romwell towers.

I got it on my arm.

This is where I'm from. For now.

Simon: Every war starts with propaganda.

But with the drug war,

our definition of what a drug user or drug seller is...

Woman: What did your mommy tell you about drugs?

Come on, try it.

Simon: It became almost

a wartime cartoon of the enemy.

Weed, coke, crack... your choice.

Some folks will tell you that I'm dealing in poison,

but hey, do I look like the kind of guy

that would do that to a kid like you?

Simon: But the truth is the drugs aren't yours.

You're just a Minion.

You're somebody without any real authority

selling somebody else's dope.

It's like fearing a guy who's at the drive-out window

at the burger king.

Shanequa: Basically it's just about survival.

I feel like sometimes, like, cops,

they view you as, "oh, you live over here."

But they don't view you as, like,

was it your choice?

Man: � I was born in a dump

� my mama died, and my daddy got drunk �

� he left me here to die or grow �

man: I wouldn't want to work anywhere else.

I feel the need to be here as a minority supervisor.

It's predominantly a minority neighborhood.

Police station for what? [indistinct]

What we deal with here

is a lot of lower-level narcotic activity.

Well, what we do to drugs,

we do mostly drugs and prostitution.

[Radio beeps]

Go ahead, papi.

Man: We're good to go.

I'm gonna go in and hit the...

Copy of the warrant,

get all of the gear, so...

All right, I'll start making my way up there.

There are sometimes I think you can trace any crime you want

to drugs.

Speaking of drug users or abusers...

Magic man!

What's up, dawg?

Please, can I get the...

You still ain't drinking, right?

Dude, you still ain't drinking, right?

No.

How long has it been?

Sober. I've been shopping, man.

How long has it been?

Probably been 2 months now.

Good for you. All right, bro.

You have a good one, brothers.

The magic man for 90.

He's been around forever.

Man: We like to look at the war on drugs

as black hats and white hats and good guys and bad guys

and victims and offenders,

and on the ground, it's a lot more mixed up than that.

Go ahead, Chet.

The guy on Charles street just re-upped.

With powder and weed.

Man: Well, the drugs are never gonna be gone.

That's... forget that.

To say you're gonna be drug free completely,

ha ha!

In drug work, you never really get that...

Satisfaction, I suppose.

'Cause you don't get rid of drugs.

I mean, along the way you have small victories here and there,

but if you look at the big picture,

are we getting anywhere?

And you could certainly be frustrated.

Man: Go get 'em. I'll come around.

Don't let 'em run.

Get out. Police. Don't move.

[Indistinct chatter]

I'm gonna get you the search warrant.

Sit tight.

Woo! Wow! You can smell it in here!

You want a haircut?

No.

You sure? Positive.

I can practice.

No.

Chip, he's got cocaine residue

on his scales, too.

[Telephone rings]

Hello. Yeah, baby.

I'm in the middle of doing something, honey.

Why? Bye, hon.

Fabio: Just doing my job, buddy.

I hear you. I'm not mad.

I made the mistake to do this.

I did it, and I'll deal with the consequences.

Kennedy: If you talk to people in law enforcement,

they believe that the community is completely corrupt.

Want to buy some weed?

Nah, I'm straight.

How about coke? You want to buy some coke?

Kennedy: They believe everybody is living off drug money,

that there is no moral center.

They see communities that blame everybody but themselves

for what's going on,

and then you talk to those communities,

and they genuinely believe that law enforcement

is using drug laws to destroy the community.

Over time, I have discovered that everybody involved

hates what's going on.

Man: It's interesting this war on drugs,

how little the American people know.

Never thought about it before.

How people feel about drugs and everything like that?

That's what you mean a war on drugs?

Narrator: As I started to ask around,

I found that if people knew anything about the war on drugs,

they thought I was talking about something in a foreign country.

Man: 6,500 people died in Mexico

in drug-related violence last year.

Narrator: Yet surprisingly very few seemed to have any idea

of the war going on in their own country.

I haven't heard the term "war on drugs" since the '80s.

Bowden: The biggest drug industry in the world

isn't in Mexico, it's not in Colombia,

it's not in Afghanistan,

it's in the United States.

Man: We in the United States, perhaps our dirty little secret

is that between $10 and $16 billion are spent by Americans

to pay for these illegal drugs,

creating a demand.

Man: The thing with the war on drugs is

it tries to deal with a health problem

as if it was a legal problem.

Addiction is an effect of human unhappiness

and human suffering.

When people are distressed, they want to soothe their distress.

When people are in pain, they want to soothe their pain.

So the real question is not why the addiction,

but why the pain?

Bowden: One of the realities is most people getting arrested

in this country for drugs

are selling drugs to support their own habit.

And if you stand in a federal court,

you're watching poor, uneducated people

be fed into a machine like meat to make sausage.

It's just bang, bang, bang, next.

Man: My mother used to tell me

I was gonna die before I turned 18.

I think I believed that...

From when I was like 14 years old.

That's when I really started gang banging.

I started getting in fights and stuff like that.

Now, I'm 28 years old,

being sentenced for 50 grams of crack cocaine.

Man: I am mark Bennett,

United States district court judge

for the northern district of Iowa.

And in my 15 years,

I've sent over 2,600 people to federal prison.

Man: I grew up around gang members and drug dealers.

Them was my role models.

Coming in here today,

Maurice haltiwanger's best chance, best chance,

is a sentence of 20 years.

Narrator: Drug laws, it turns out,

often carry what are called mandatory minimum sentences,

below which a judge cannot sentence the defendant

no matter what the circumstance is.

Mcgough: You've got a guy like Maurice haltiwanger

who grows up in a bad family situation

with heartbreaking details of how he got where he is today.

But even if judge Bennett wanted to give him a sentence

below 20 years, he can't.

Haltiwanger: My mother was addicted to drugs.

I don't remember my father at all.

Man: Why?

He got killed when I was, like, 3 years old.

There was a lot of death around me.

I seen a lot of people die.

I got a lot of friends that's dead.

But... Huh.

It could have been worse.

[Gavel pounds]

Woman: All rise.

Man: We're here in the Bible belt,

you know, law and order Oklahoma,

the prison is the largest employer in the county.

The employees live all around here,

and if you take out a prison, the town would just dry up.

Man: I don't know that there's a job I could do better

in the whole world.

I guess they should have wrote "prison guard" on my forehead

when I was born because it just fits me.

The job was built for me.

Franklin: You know, we incarcerate women

at the highest per capita rate in the nation.

Males have been incarcerated, I believe, the third highest rate.

How you doing?

We have 1,500 inmates.

The majority are drug or drug-related crimes.

Man: I'm here on a 12-year drug trafficking sentence,

trafficking crack cocaine.

I'm 34 years old. I've been here since I was 23.

I'm doing a life sentence for second-degree murder.

I killed a guy buying a bad drug deal in Oklahoma city.

Never been high on a piece of dope in my entire life,

but I've sold tons of it unfortunately.

Carpenter: We have a nice secure facility.

I can keep anybody you want to keep

and I can keep 'em for as long as you want to keep 'em.

The facility itself is as secure as it can get.

Lift your genitals up.

Turn around and spread your butt.

Spread it with your hands.

Narrator: As it turns out,

drug laws have become so harsh

that even the nonviolent can now be locked up for sentences

once reserved for violent crimes.

Franklin: I think a lot of times we lock up everybody

just because we're mad at them.

We need to lock up the people that we're afraid of.

They need to be locked up,

but not the people that we're mad at.

Carpenter: I mean, I'm a law and order guy.

I'm a firm believer, no free rides.

Here, you recognize that your chances to manipulate the system

are done.

That door slams behind you,

and you have absolutely no ability to control

what goes on on the other side of that door.

And you can't open the door.

This is where most people, if they're a newcomer,

a first-time offender, where they really figure out

that this is prison,

and this is what the next 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years of your life

looks like, this is it.

[Door slams shut]

Narrator: While following the steps

that so many Americans take

through the world of the drug war,

I couldn't help but notice that at every stage,

black Americans were disproportionately represented.

Woman: You know, in any war, you've got to have an enemy,

and when you think about the impact particularly

on poor people of color,

there are more African Americans under correctional control today

in prison or jail, on probation or parole

than were enslaved in 1850,

a decade before the civil war began.

And that's something we haven't been willing

to look in the mirror and ask ourselves,

"what's really going on?"

Narrator: As it turns out,

nearly everyone I talked to knew all about

the impact of the drug war on black America.

Man: There's no question that the criminal laws impact

disproportionately on poor and minorities.

Correia: Certainly a disproportionate number

of black people are prosecuted.

Narrator: Yet while people could tell me all about

their first-hand experience with this,

very few had any idea where it came from.

Newscaster: Here's America as you can I like to think of it,

the land of the free and the home of the brave.

But from every part of the nation come newspaper headlines

telling us of an enemy,

America's secret enemy number 1.

Woman: � summertime

� and the living is easy

Simon: The drug war began as a war on dangerous narcotics,

at least on its face.

You know, you can trace modern drug enforcement

back to the early '50s

when you started to see the rise

of the sort of urban narcotics squads,

the narc.

Newscaster: Government agencies charged with the enforcement

of narcotics laws have been able until recently

to decrease steadily the number of addicts in the United States.

Simon: It was at least plausible as a policy

because the use of dangerous narcotics

was truly a counterculture.

It was the jazz man's license, it was in the back alleys.

It was furtive.

There was no mass marketing.

There were no drive-up drug corners.

It was a very small percentage of the American population

that was engaged in the use of heroin or cocaine.

That's him.

Narrator: In the 1950s as drug use was growing

among Americans of all background,

law enforcement became increasingly focused

on 1 group in particular.

Why did you turn the dogs loose on the policemen?

Man: Are you telling me that this happened

or are you asking me?

I'm asking you.

No!

Were there narcotics in there?

Man: � well, I have a family, born free �

� I guess that's the way it's supposed to be �

there's no question that there was a passion with which

the early narcotics enforcement culture

pursued black America,

even though the addict population was always

distinctly biracial.

Narrator: In the 1960s, drug use grew widespread in America,

but for black communities, increasing poverty

pushed the sale and use of drugs most often onto the street,

making them an even greater target for law enforcement.

Simon: By the late '60s,

most urban areas had a mass market for drugs.

By the '80s, you're really looking at

the drive-thru window, you were looking at McDonald's.

At that point, you can't claim that you're trying to isolate

a countercultural phenomenon.

You're fighting a war against a whole community.

Woman: � amazing grace

� how sweet the sound

narrator: In October 2009,

I joined nannie jeter at the funeral of a family member

I'd known growing up.

Over the years, drugs had deeply affected her life,

and the event brought back difficult memories for nannie.

Nannie: My son James, he died in '89 or '87.

I can't quite remember.

Before he died, he said, "mommy, I'm just tired of it.

"I cannot live this life.

"It doesn't matter what I do.

I just want to die."

All I know, my son used the needle.

Narrator: Though I'd known about James' death

at the time it happened,

I didn't know the extent of his addiction

nor how widely drugs and the drug war

had affected nannie's family.

It wasn't until I started catching up

with childhood friends...

You're kidding me.

That I began to realize the full extent of it.

Man: Any bastard of our family.

I didn't realize my father was into... was a heroin addict.

Yeah. I got the news in channels. Ha ha.

How come you didn't tell me?

Drugs.

The war on drugs has been going on for so long, man,

it's tough.

That one there, man, I just got to say

God got to intervene on this.

Narrator: Again and again, I heard how drug laws

had done more to punish individuals and their loves ones

than to mount a serious effort to prevent drug abuse.

But if this is what the drug was was doing to nannie's family,

what was it doing to other families?

There's a structural problem in the country

that we keep ignoring.

We have 2 million people in our jails and prisons,

and a million of them are African American,

most of them are males,

many of them for nonviolent drug offenses.

That is a pattern that has overwhelmed

the African American community

because we're getting a whole generation of kids

who now have the assumption that they're destined

to be in the criminal justice system.

What people need to see today

is that the next generation of children right now

with the barriers they face aren't going to be like I was

or like my parents were or like my grandparents were,

a generation better than those who preceded them.

Man: At the precinct, they told me my charge

was a conspiracy charge,

conspiracy of 50 grams or more.

Shh...

I messed up.

That's all I'm thinking about is I messed up.

A reputed member of a notorious drug gang

was caught in a drug bust in st,. Albans today.

Man: 24-year-old Anthony Johnson of New York was arrested

along with 2 other people during a drug raid.

Investigators said Johnson had been bringing crack

from New York to sell in Vermont.

Man: Right now you've pled guilty to a charge

which requires a 5-year-mandatory minimum.

You know what that means?

I can't get less than 5 years.

That seems harsh when you think about the fact

that he is not violent at all.

So it's critical to present Anthony

as far more than a drug dealer.

Woman: John pacht is one of the best criminal defense lawyers

in Vermont, and he came to me and says,

"Susan, I really need your help with this kid."

I really believe that he was, you know,

in the wrong place, didn't have a lot of options.

Narrator: Though Anthony Johnson was arrested in rural Vermont,

he is originally from the very same New York housing project

where he first met shanequa benitez.

So you know Anthony? Yeah.

Anthony Johnson, he's 24 years old,

and he's looking at 5-40 years of jail.

You know, by the time he gets out,

he won't have a life.

Narrator: Following Anthony's legal team

as they investigated the steps leading to his arrest,

I started to learn more about where he came from.

More clearly than before, I could see how the vicious cycle

of the drug wars spans generations.

Anthony: I wish my father was way different, you know?

I remember one day I was outside

in front of the building,

you know, I noticed him

doing a little hand-to-hand.

And ever since then,

I figured he was a drug dealer.

Then after that, I kind of seen him

a couple times doing it.

Did you ever ask him about it?

No. Never asked him.

Why?

'Cause I don't ask those questions.

I knew,

so I ain't really want to hear his answers.

So that's why I ain't really asked.

All right, now.

When I heard of it, he's selling drugs,

to be honest with you, to be totally honest with you,

it didn't surprise me.

From where we was at, where we came out of,

where we lived.

The drug dealers are looked at

as really the leaders of the community.

If your moms can't pay rent,

they help out on the rent.

If you needed a little bit of food sometimes,

they will give money to your household for food.

It's like back in the day, magic had the converse out.

Everybody wanted the new converses,

and he would get them for you.

The drug dealer would come right up the block from us,

5 or 6 of us.

"You pick out a pair, you pick out a pair,

you pick out a pair."

We come back on the block, we all carrying sneaker boxes.

He in front of us.

And oh, everybody want to know what's up.

"Where you get the magics? You got the magics.

You got the magics."

And then we tell them who we got them from.

The next step is every time he comes on the block,

you're always under him.

He wants his water from the store.

He'll give you a $5.00 bill. "Go get me a water."

You know, the change is yours.

Half these waters he didn't drink.

Ice cream truck came, always bought us ice cream.

And he didn't even have to pay.

He'd tell the ice cream man, "hey, yo, get 'em."

And the ice cream man would give us all ice cream.

Honestly, I loved him.

I loved him because when they came around, it was Christmas.

As you get older, they say you get your own money.

Sell drugs, sell drugs.

"I don't know how to sell no drugs."

He said, "you don't have to know how to sell 'em."

"Just stand there. I'll send them over to you."

He gave me the drugs. I stood there.

And he would point, and they would come to me.

And then I had my own sneaker money,

I had my own movie money.

And then I had my own power.

Our role models wasn't nobody famous.

You know?

I mean, where I come from in the neighborhood,

there was hood famous, you know.

My big brother, Dennis Johnson,

he came from doing the same thing.

But it was mostly 1 person, my man te.

He was everything I wanted to be.

He had the girls, the clothes, you know,

the jewelry, the cars, the money.

That's what I wanted, you know?

But I wanted to be te.

I wanted to be little te.

Te schooled me to the game.

You know, he'd show me how to get money,

but I worked it.

[Baby fussing]

Woman: Hey, John, I somehow just missed your call.

I just wanted to double check with you

and give you a chance to talk to Alicia

about where we're at and what Anthony's looking at.

They're trying to go for 5.

But if not, anything under 10.

They're not trying to make him

go beyond that.

Yeah.

Like the 5-40 was scaring me. Ha!

I was always proud of him,

but I just always figured that he was ok,

that he was good, you know?

Anthony: I know I screwed up,

because you know you need that father figure in your life.

Oh...

I know my daughter, she need me,

and I don't want me and her to have the same relationship

me and my father had,

looking at me in pictures,

and got to say that's my dad, you know, come to visiting.

You know, I got to tell her daddy's at school

when I speak to her on the phone or something, you know?

'Cause I don't want to tell her that I'm in jail.

Narrator: Watching Anthony's child sleep

hundreds of Miles from the father she's never met,

I could see the painful cycle gripping his family,

but I also had to honestly wonder what compelled him

to make the choices he did.

Ogletree: You know, it's very interesting,

people ask the question, what about personal responsibility?

The only thing you don't do is blame criminals

for the crime that they committed.

You blame everybody else and everything else...

Ogletree: You know, I wish the answer were that simple,

but let's just take a little step back.

There are structural impediments.

What you see over and over again in urban America

are kids who live in a crowded home,

who are hungry when they go to school,

who lack attention because they've heard noise and gunshots

and other things where they live.

Man: I don't think people fully understand.

In the inner city,

these kids are making rational choices.

I profiled a girl who was like this,

a 10-year-old girl.

The minute she steps out her front doorway,

there are drug dealers out there,

no economic opportunity.

The school is warehousing her.

She doesn't see any prospects.

How is she supposed to get out?

At the end of the day

when there's not a lot of resources out here

and your teachers aren't stressing you to come to class

or not even caring, you know, you're not gonna go to school.

You're gonna sell drugs.

You're gonna do what you have to do.

Simon: To go down to a drug corner in the inner city

is the rational act of somebody going to work

for the only company that exists in a company town,

when that is the only economy that's functioning

in certain places in this country.

What do we expect?

Narrator: Beyond the structural barriers that promote drug crime

on the street, those arrested soon find themselves

in the self-perpetuating cycle

from which few ever really escape.

Ogletree: People don't realize, for example,

that when you arrest a young black man and he goes to jail,

the first thing when he gets out of the prison,

he can't get a job in most places because of his record.

Woman: If you have a family charge,

you need to be working,

you need to be trying to move yourself forward.

Ogletree: If he wants to go back to school to go to college,

he's ineligible by law for certain grants.

Woman: Medical issues. If you have anything...

Ogletree: He can't get certain healthcare benefits.

He can't live in certain neighborhoods.

His family that was the centerpiece of his life,

if they're living in public housing, they can't take him in.

Bill Clinton: The only people who deserve to live

in public housing are those who live responsibly there.

He can't vote.

Alexander: Release from prison offers this idea

that you're gonna return to some kind of freedom,

but in reality, for the rest of your life,

you've got to check that box on employment applications

asking that dreaded question,

"have you ever been convicted of a felony?"

It becomes a vicious circle in which people cycle out of

their ghetto communities into prison and back.

As a physician, I'm concerned with the casualties

of the war on drugs,

which is the front line users and the petty dealers.

But rather than seeing a drug problem in isolation,

you have to see it in the social context.

These are not problems, none of them,

that are just intrinsic to individuals.

They all represent

multi-generational family history,

culture, social conditions, and human failure.

You know, like, you say all the things that you knew

that when you was coming up that was wrong.

Now I'm starting to do them, but I can't control it

because I've got these problems.

I'm using drugs. I'm halfway selling drugs.

I'm using drugs.

And now I've got these 2 little boys, pretty boys...

And I don't know how to...

Really relate to that.

I know I'm supposed to. I know I ain't have one.

And I know I'm supposed to.

Ah...

I didn't know how to stop doing what I was doing.

Excuse me.

To be like that.

Narrator: Seeing the pain Anthony's father carries

over both his own choices and the impact of outside pressures,

I wondered how a matter of public health

didn't just inspire early drug laws,

but became the full-blown target of a war.

Nixon: America's public enemy number 1

in the United States is drug abuse.

In order to fight and defeat this enemy,

it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive.

Man: Target's ready. Male negro, 5' 7".

[Gunshot]

Bowden: The U.S. war on drugs

was initiated officially under president Richard Nixon

to get his polls up.

Narrator: For most people I talked to,

the drug war as we know it today

was born in the late '60s and early '70s

under Richard Nixon.

Nixon: I have no sympathy for the pushers and the peddlers

and the others in this country.

[Cheering]

We are going to restore freedom from fear in America again!

Man: When Nixon ran for president in 1968,

he talked about the problem of crime in the street.

Nixon: The wave of crime is not going to be

the wave of the future in the United States of America.

Mauer: And this was really the first time

in a major way that the issue of drug crime

became a national political issue.

Give 'em a...

Alexander: Richard Nixon is credited as the first

to coin the term "a war on drugs,"

but what most people don't realize

is that under Richard Nixon,

2/3 of the drug war budget was devoted to treatment

rather than law enforcement.

Because a program of law enforcement alone

is not enough.

Simon: Well, Nixon actually had some forward thinking

in the war on drugs.

He understood the need to address addiction.

Nixon: This means that on the treatment of addicts,

we must go parallel...

Simon: And he actually did some things that were progressive,

certainly by standards of what came after him.

Nixon: You don't turn to the drugs

unless you can't find satisfaction another way

in your own life.

Narrator: The more I learned about Nixon,

the more confusing he became.

Privately, he knew that he'd be far more successful

with drug treatment than with law enforcement,

but publicly at the '72 election approached,

Nixon returned to the simple crime-fighting rhetoric

that had worked for him before.

Nixon: We must wage what I have called total war

against public enemy number 1 in the United States,

the problem with dangerous drugs.

Newscaster: Nixon wins re-election

in a landslide victory...

Narrator: As Nixon's tough talk proved a recipe

for electoral success,

states across the country began passing tough new laws.

Half the crime is caused by narcotic addicts.

With New York's rockefeller drug laws

setting an example for harsh penalties,

he would soon be followed by other states.

Man: You guys better get ready in a few minutes.

At 7:58 you are just almost out of time.

Yes, sir.

You guys be careful.

Ok. Bye, dad. Love you.

Love you, too.

Carpenter: I am very much a law and order kind of guy.

I would rather have 10 police cars

than 1 soup kitchen if you give me the choice,

but sometimes I think that we need to be smarter

about what those police officers are actually out there doing.

Narrator: Maybe because he's seen the epitome

of the hardened prison official,

Mike carpenter's perspective on the severity of drug laws

caught me off guard.

Carpenter: I think a long time ago

we made drugs into this huge thing

and we've made it so illegal

and we've made it such a national issue

with that tough on crime stance,

I mean, you can't get elected

if you don't profess to be tough on crime.

First we have to join together

and ensure the drug dealers are punished

swiftly, surely, and severely.

Carpenter: You can't stay elected if you don't do things

to be tough on crime.

Bush: Is to toughen sentences,

beef up law enforcement,

and build new prison space for 24,000 inmates.

Carpenter: You know, nobody can afford to be the first guy

to say wait a minute, we can't afford what we're doing.

Let's do something different

because if you even made a noise

like you were gonna be soft on crime in any way,

you would be out of a job.

You will be put away and put away for good,

3 strikes and you are out.

[Applause]

Carpenter: You get in front of the camera,

and you talk loudly about we need to lock up criminals,

we need to make our streets safe,

and so we become victims of the sound bite.

Reagan: The American people want their government to get tough

and to go on the offensive,

and that's exactly what we intend.

Carpenter: I think sometimes we have people doing

a whole lot of time for not very much crime.

It's almost like they're paying for our fear

instead of paying for their crime.

Narrator: For many working in corrections,

I heard the same frustration,

that political rhetoric not only floods their facilities,

but robs them of the resources they need to do their jobs.

Franklin: People want to lock people up

and keep them locked away.

And then when their sentence is over,

they expect this person to be reformed or a different person,

then if you haven't given them any skills or trained them,

how can they be?

Man: I'm the cabinet maker director here

at Lexington vo-tech.

When these guys get out of prison, we find them a job

and help them get a job.

Keeps 'em working,

make some taxpayers in the state of Oklahoma.

Franklin: He's already got 1 strike against him

that he's a convicted felon,

but at least he can say, hey, I'm a licensed electrician

or a licensed carpenter.

Carpenter: For a lot of these guys,

they've never had self-respect, I guess.

I mean, it's been false self-respect

because they were tough or because they stole a lot

or because they sold a lot of drugs,

and this gives them the chance to anchor themselves

to something good, these rehabilitation programs.

Man: Prison is not a nice place,

but I'm glad I came here.

It's made me a better person.

This program's probably the best thing that's happened to me

in my life.

All: We are seeking change,

accepting how we cannot change our past

but we can change our future.

Carpenter: The problem is, when you get into lean budget times,

the public, the citizens of Oklahoma,

say, if we have to spend money on something,

let's spend money on fences, handcuffs, cell doors,

that kind of stuff.

The rehabilitation programs

are often the first thing that get cut.

Franklin: If we don't have the resources available,

that equates to not being able to give an offender

a trade or a skill

and they end up going right back to the same deviant behavior

on the outside.

[Woman humming]

Woman: � if I didn't care more than words can say �

� if I didn't care...

Man: I'm Larry cearley.

I'm the marshal here in magdalena.

Magdalena is a small spot in the world.

We're about 250 Miles from the Mexican border.

We have U.S. highway 60.

That's a main corridor for drugs.

I need your driver's license, please, and your insurance.

Cearley: For the last 29 years in working in law enforcement,

the major thing that's changed is the drug trafficking.

What are you looking for, those drug guys?

Anything, everything.

[Baa]

Narrator: At first glance,

marshal cearley seemed form a bygone era of law enforcement.

Cearley: I guess I'm gonna portray myself

as that kind of person,

a man with a white hat riding old silver.

Narrator: But as enforcing drug laws

has become the primary focus for police across the country,

the nature of his work as a small town marshal

has changed as well.

Cearley: You got that?

2 hispanic males in a car, dark, tinted windows,

we want it on that side of the road.

Yeah. Ok.

What are you gonna tell her?

She knows you're going to jail.

Go ahead and put him in the car.

Ok if I check in there a little bit more?

Got some marijuana here.

Ed, you arrest both these people and tow his car.

That's what we're gonna do.

We're fishing.

We're fishing, but we're there again.

I mean, you look at trucks like this truck here,

that's an Arizona truck,

somebody that's not gonna stop and get a motel room,

somebody that's been driving for 24 hours.

Because they don't want to get caught.

This is telling me that this person right here

could be a drug trafficker.

What's he doing that's giving you

that impression?

The truck and fast food.

It's supposed to be illegal to profile,

but you kind of, after working so long,

you kind of know who's doing something.

So is it sort of phony

when people say they don't profile?

Oh, it's all phony. It's all phony.

If you don't profile vehicles,

you're not in law enforcement.

That's the way it is, man, you know, you know?

Come on.

Ok, now what about profiling people?

Profiling people, same thing.

That's what we have.

Simon: We like to believe that the drug war

has given law enforcement all of these tools,

all of this authority in which to pursue

criminality and gangsterism,

but actually what it did was

it basically destroyed the police deterrent

in a very subtle and unintended way.

Going up to 15th street and Dixie.

He's gonna have some crack for him

and some oxycodone pills.

Man: Joe and I are both sergeants in Miami narcotics,

and we don't do street level drug deals.

We do larger quantity cases.

We're looking for the dealers and the suppliers.

Ok, deal is good, guys. Go in.

Narrator: A world away from magdalena

in the streets of Miami,

I began to see the real impact of the drug war

on law enforcement.

Start thinking about why you're in handcuffs

and maybe you can help yourself out, ok?

So what happened is the second guy,

he's now running on foot.

Yeah, that's where... we believe he might have gone in there.

I guess we're gonna have to write this up

as a separate case.

Totally unrelated to the original drug deal we did,

but we stumbled upon a house

where a couple of big stacks of money,

a good amount of marijuana,

that's sometimes how things happen.

You know, they're not even planned.

Simon: Nobody respects good police work more than me.

I spent more than a decade covering it,

and there are a lot of detectives who I admire

for their professionalism, for their craft.

Hey, what's up, can I help you?

No, officer.

Simon: The drug war created an environment

in which none of that was rewarded.

Come on over here for a second.

Let's get his I.D.

He's just cutting through the yard.

A drug arrest does not require anything

other than getting out of your radio car

and jacking people up against the side of a liquor store.

Probable cause? Are you kidding?

I don't want to say a majority of the people,

but there's a good number of people probably in this area

that are also involved in drug dealing.

The problem is there's a real tendency

on the part of law enforcement to think geographically.

To go throw resources at an area.

It's fish in a barrel for law enforcement.

Anytime you need to make an arrest,

you troll through there.

Everybody committing crimes in that area gets arrested,

people who are in the area who aren't committing crimes

get stopped.

It makes everybody angry.

Narrator: Watching arrest after arrest,

I began to see for the first time

the destructive impact of drug laws

no only on those they target,

but on those who enforce them as well.

Simon: The problem is that that cop

that made that cheap drug arrest,

he's gonna get paid.

He's gonna get the hours of overtime

for taking the drugs down e.C.U.

He's gonna get paid for processing the prisoner

down in central booking.

He's gonna get paid for sitting back at his desk

and writing the paperwork for a couple hours,

and he's gonna do that 40, 50, 60 times a month,

so that his base pay might end up being

only half of what he's paid as a police officer.

The most important thing, right here.

We're paying a guy for stats.

You can leave them here

and then we can go back out and do this other deal.

Simon: Compare that guy to the 1 guy doing police work

solving a murder, a rape, a robbery, a burglary,

if he gets lucky, he makes 1 arrest for the month.

He gets 1 slip signed.

And at the end of the month when they look and they see

officer a, he made 60 arrests.

Officer b made 1 arrest.

Who do you think they make the sergeant?

Ok, let's move in, guys, move in.

In a city like, say, Baltimore, where I'm from,

our percentage of arrest for murder, for rape and robbery

are half of what they once were.

Our drug arrest stats are twice of what they once were.

So what does that do?

It makes the city unlivable.

It makes a police department where nobody can solve a crime.

Narrator: Beyond the incentives that exist

for individual officers,

it turns out that whole departments

have a monetary interest in increased drug arrests.

Alexander: Most people don't realize

that the financial incentives built into the system

virtually guarantee that the overwhelming majority

of drug arrests in the United States

will be for nonviolent, low-level drug offenses.

Cuneen: A couple months ago we did a 2-day operation.

We arrested over 200 people,

the majority of them for selling drugs.

A lot of the money comes out of seizures

from the drug profits

that the bigger players are making off of this.

So I guess that money being put to good use.

Man: So we get all their money?

That money is ours now. That's my money now.

If I leave this room

and I go out there and get in my old truck,

and I drive down the highway with $5,000 cash

in pocket that I earned,

and if I'm pulled over by a state trooper who says,

oh, you have a defective taillight or something,

they can take that 5 grand, never charge me with a crime,

take my old truck to boot,

keep 'em forever.

It's called recoup. Civil asset seizure.

It goes on every day in counties all over this country.

Hey, can we get...

somebody get a tow slip for this fine piece of machinery?

Cearley: Yeah. See, like, there's $118,000.

I pulled over right here, and we arrested the guy.

There's the 25,000 I got out of that seizure.

That's what we bought this car for.

Ok, so the police department

operates on the money it seizes?

Uh... Sometimes.

This is legal within the state of new Mexico.

Man: It's allegedly legal.

No. It is legal.

If you're no getting the point, I understand.

No, I am getting the point! Probable cause.

Simon: What happens is

with every successive encounter,

between one of our drug warriors

and a citizen that goes awry...

Man: The people around here mind their own business!

Respect for cops and the laws they're trying to enforce

is lost.

Cearley: The guy was upset because he was saying

we were stopping him illegally,

it was unconstitutional.

He feels like he's been violated.

Is that fair? Maybe not. But I have a job to do.

Narrator: Despite their commitment to their work,

officers I spoke to across the country

expressed growing concern not only about the effectiveness

of drug laws, but about their larger impact

on the relationship between police and the public.

It's one of the biggest hurdles, you know,

how much time the community has spent

feeling like they couldn't trust the police.

Narrator: In Providence, officers who 20 years ago

appeared on TV as the picture of tough-on-crime cops...

7-1. It's got tinted windows...

Today seem conflicted over how things got where they are

and what a better approach might look like.

If you gonna go out there and go and cause chaos,

then why don't we put you in a structured program?

And the military's a structured program,

send 'em to boot camp, see how they make out in boot camp.

National service.

National service?

Zuena: I mean, we're doing our part out here,

and it's frustrating a lot for us

because it just seems like because they're addicts,

they find themselves committing the same crime

that just put them in the jail, say, you know,

a week or so Friday.

Hold on a second.

All right, whoa.

What's going on? Let me see you I.D., please.

Let me see your I.D.

My I.D.?

Zuena: Come on, some responsibilities

go back to the parents.

Listen, straighten your kid out.

Well, that's easier said than done

when you have absentee parents.

What? You want...

relax, man, relax.

Some of these households the father is nonexistent,

the mother is trying to raise a family.

Those kids, the percentage of kids that break out of that

is really low.

Please. It's not me.

Zuena: I'll tell you what else bothers me.

If you keep having kids, and you can't afford them,

you know what?

You got to have a certain responsibility.

I'm not saying to frigging control or spay 'em,

but Christ, [indistinct] You know?

But come on.

It's... Jesus. Ha ha.

What they should do,

I'd pay 'em, like, $5,000 or $10,000

to get like a vasectomy or something.

Ha ha!

Cheaper in the long run.

Ha ha!

Why are you laughing?

Man: Everybody's here but the police,

and they'll be here any minute.

Narrator: Watching seasoned drug warriors

struggle for answers to what they see as an unwinnable war...

Cuneen: We're actually doing them a favor,

getting them in out of the cold,

narrator: I wondered what it was about drugs

that made them such a perceived danger in the first place.

Bowden: You have to understand the war on drugs

has never been about drugs.

Newscaster: U.S. customs officers and police

are having another drive to round up dope smugglers.

There's millions of dollars worth of deadly heroin,

enough they say to kill 6 million people.

Narrator: Looking to find out more about the longer history

of drugs in America, I found an unlikely source

in Lincoln historian Richard Miller.

His research put drugs laws in a fascinating historical context.

Man: Historically anti-drug laws

have always been associated with race.

In the 1800s, certain kinds of drugs that are illicit today

were common in this country.

Cocaine was widely used, heroin.

People using drugs, it was something that was just

ordinarily accepted.

Opium, for example, was used by middle-aged successful whites

often housewives in the South.

If people were addicted or abusing drugs,

they were viewed sympathetically as people who had to be helped.

It was seen as a public health issue rather than a crime issue.

But one of the first changes was on the west coast,

when smoking opium was made a criminal offense.

Now, why would opium smoking be illegal in California

but not in Mississippi?

What was going on in California

that was concerned about smoking opium?

Well, as it turns out, it had nothing to do with opium itself.

The concern was with the people associated with smoking opium,

and that was the Chinese, who had come to this country,

and many of whom were in California working hard,

working for very little pay,

and becoming part of the American success story.

But their success was taking jobs away from white workers.

So politicians got together and decided,

"we got to find something about the Chinese

"for which they can be criminalized

to get them out of the way."

Now, of course you can't throw people in jail

simply because they're Chinese,

but you can throw 'em in jail because they smoke opium.

In the same way we saw things going on with cocaine.

Again, it was middle-aged successful people

in this country, business executives,

physicians, housewives, all perfectly legal,

but then around the turn of the century,

cocaine began being associated with blacks.

They could withstand police bullets, it was thought.

They can work hard all day, all night long and all day long,

again threatening the jobs of white workers,

and so laws began to be passed against cocaine.

You're not arresting these people officially

because they're black;

You're arresting them because they've committed

some sort of drug violation.

Next of course we see a change in reputation of hemp

in this ad,

hemp was a legitimate crop from colonial times forward,

a widely appreciated commercial product,

but then in the 1930s, it changed into something

vicious and fearful called marijuana.

Because at that time marijuana smoking was being associated

with Mexicans working hard, working cheap,

and once again what was being outlawed was not being Mexican,

but just some habit associated with Mexicans.

These laws set up a very dangerous precedent

or racial control.

Narrator: It seemed that time and again,

drug laws targeted any immigrant group seen as a threat

to the established economic order.

But how then did black Americans,

who came to this country over 200 years ago,

become the primary target of drug laws in the modern era?

Simon: Well, the way to think about African American history

in the 20th century is as an immigrant story.

I mean, the transition from the rural to the urban,

it's one of the great mass migrations

in the history of the world.

Wilson: When blacks came out of slavery,

they were heavily concentrated in the South

in farming-type jobs.

As industries were expanding in the north,

blacks were recruited to come to work in factories.

This gave rise to the great migration

of blacks flowing into urban areas.

Narrator: Before she came to work for my family,

nannie jeter had joined the wave of black Americans

who had moved north during the great migration.

She took me down to her childhood home

in Southern Virginia.

Nannie: We grew up running through the woods.

What a beautiful outside life.

The old victrola would play,

and somebody would square dance,

and it was a completely different world.

I loved life in the South.

Now, in that environment

that seemed so wonderful in the South,

why did you ever decide you wanted to leave the South?

I'd left the South because I had to.

Jim crow during that time, you couldn't...

black people, if they was raped,

they couldn't say they was raped.

So you never hear the rape.

Only the white lady got raped.

But the black woman...

I was innocent, but people didn't think I was innocent.

No one knew I was leaving.

I wanted to bring my children up different.

North was the way out.

I thought it would make a big difference.

Narrator: Nannie had never spoken so openly about her past

and what it was that had compelled her north.

But as I learned more about her life,

I began to see the deeper roots of the drug war

for black American families like nannie's.

Sadly, what many of these families came to find

is that they had not really escaped Jim crow at all.

But found themselves in a new system of racial control,

a new Jim crow.

Racially discriminatory laws across America

ensured that poor people of color migrating from the South

would be confined to certain parts of the city

that we now think of as ghettos.

Simon: Very few people know this,

but if you go back and you look

at how African American housing patterns were established

in the '30s and '40s,

even as a result of the new deal,

the fha, which was a Democratic new deal program

to inspire home ownership in the midst of the depression

did more to create ghettoes than any other federal program

before or since.

Why? Because when they were creating

the culture of home ownership in America,

they were exclusionary to black people.

They put them in the areas that were maybe a little bit

economically depressed and subject to heavy rentership,

and then the redlined those areas,

and they would not write fha mortgages

in those neighborhoods.

Once those areas were redlined,

that was basically a design for a ghetto.

In 1950, people in these neighborhoods were poor

but they had jobs.

By 1960, we're talking about the jobless poor.

Because industries had moved out of the inner city

leaving behind concentrated populations of poor people,

vulnerable to drug trafficking and all the other problems

associated with joblessness.

Simon: And what happens when groups are denied access

to the core economic engines in a society?

They create their own out of prohibited economies.

That was true of the Italians and the Irish

and the Jews and everybody else who came to the cities

a generation before African Americans arrived.

Nannie: In 1969, during that time, I couldn't get a job.

It was like all the doors were shut.

When I came to work for your parents,

I was happy just to have this job.

Narrator: Do you remember this first time you saw me?

Mm-hmm. Yes.

You was about 3 days old

when your mom brought you home from the hospital.

That was the first time I seen you.

You were a beautiful baby that I fell in love with.

And you became my baby.

I loved your family.

I guess I never dreamt that you guys would ever leave new haven.

Narrator: I've always known that when I was very young,

my family's circumstances improved,

and we moved from Connecticut, where my dad had been a doctor,

to a comfortable suburb of New York City,

where he'd started a successful business.

What I didn't know

was how this had impacted nannie and her family.

Nannie: Your mom, she said,

"my husband's gonna double your pay if you can go with us."

I felt more money would make a better life for my family.

That was the wrong thing to do.

I was always working in New York

whilst my kids were in new haven.

My youngest son, James, he started smoking marijuana at 14,

and at 20 he started to really go into drugs.

It is so amazing how you spend your life providing,

loving your kids that you don't see the mental part

that's going on in their life.

In turn, then you look at white kids,

they have their parent and they have a housekeeper

that loves them,

but yet still your kids are most of the time alone.

Narrator: Then what happened with James?

He got... Um...

He died with aids...

From used, you know, needles.

Narrator: As nannie and I returned to new haven together,

I suddenly saw my birthplace with new eyes.

Processing so much I hadn't understood

about the intersection of James' life and my own.

But what else had I missed?

Growing up in the wake of the civil rights movement,

I guess like many people

I imagined things were gonna get better for black America,

but as it turned out, in many ways,

the worst was yet to come.

Man: Growing up in Florida,

I remember thinking that I never wanted to leave Florida.

I used to tell my friends,

like before we'd go out and do some illegal activity,

I used to give them a pep talk and say,

"you know, God is on our side because he knows that we're poor

"and God wouldn't have us be poor,

so he understands what we're doing."

And you know, I actually believed that.

Narrator: Carl hart was part of a generation of black men

who experienced first hand the most dramatic escalation

of the drug war in American history.

Today a Professor of psychology

at New York's Columbia university,

his past experience remains a driving force

in his work.

Hart: Growing up in the 1970s and '80s,

man of my friends and family members

got caught up in drug use.

So I was always interested in drugs of abuse.

What I do today is that I actually give people drugs

in the laboratory to study the effects

of drugs like methamphetamine, cocaine, marijuana.

Narrator: Though Carl's academic research

is on the science behind addiction,

his own experience has shown him how often drug laws are shaped

less by scientific concern than by political ones.

Hart: In the 1980s, like many people in the black community,

I was concerned about the havoc that drugs were wreaking

in our community

or the havoc that I thought drugs were wreaking

in our community.

That brings us to the major and sweeping effort

that I'm announcing this morning.

Narrator: In the long history of the drug war,

no single chapter would turn out to impact black America

more deeply than the 8 years of the Reagan presidency.

What do you do when someone offers you drugs?

All: Just say no!

Narrator: While Nancy Reagan's popular slogan "just say no"

took what would seem a motherly approach to drug prevention,

her husband took a far tougher approach.

Ronald Reagan: We will utilize the FBI, the DEA, the IRS,

the atf, immigration and naturalization service,

United States marshal services, amd the coast guard.

We intend to do what is necessary

to end the drug menace

and to eliminate this dark, evil enemy within.

[Child yelling in spanish]

Alexander: When Reagan announced that he was planning

to rev up the drug war more than ever,

it was political opportunity

because at the time drug crime was actually on the decline,

not on the rise.

Less than 2% of the American population

even identifies drugs as the nation's top priority.

But then of course they got lucky.

Crack cocaine.

Crack, the super addictive and deadly cocaine concentrate.

Crack hit the streets, and suddenly there was just hysteria

about this brand-new demon-like form of cocaine.

Reagan: Today, there's a new epidemic... smokeable cocaine...

otherwise known as crack.

It is an uncontrolled fire.

Go, go, go, go!

Police!

Reagan: The American people want their government to get tough

and to go on the offensive.

And that's exactly what we intend

with more ferocity than ever before.

Freeze!

Police! Freeze!

There's your crack.

Newscaster: If smaller cities don't have a crack crisis now,

they will soon.

Woman: They're just carrying on like it's their living room,

like this is their home, like they belong here.

They don't belong here.

Hart: What we saw were images of black urbanites on TV

smoking crack cocaine over and over and over.

And then these incredible stories were associated with

crack cocaine and they were taken as fact.

Newscaster: The drug so powerful,

it will empty the money from your pockets,

make you sell the watch off your wrist,

the clothes off your back.

Or kill your mother.

Yeah. That's what we're seeing.

Hart: But if you go back to the 1920s and the '30s,

this is what people were saying about marijuana.

Man: As elvin takes that frying pan from the stove

and kills his mother with it.

Not a very nice thing to look at,

but this is marijuana.

Hart: If you say that now in our society,

people will look at you like you're crazy,

but whenever you have a new drug introduced into society,

you can say incredible things about that drug

and people will believe you.

Tip o'Neil: Our society is now infested

with drug abusers.

Man: There was a tremendous fear of this epidemic

that was gonna overcome all of us,

not only with drug addiction,

but the violence in turn that was gonna come out of this

and tremendous fear led to this view

that the criminal laws would save us.

Mauer: Democrats as well as Republicans got on board

to pass a whole new generation of mandatory sentencing laws.

These laws raced through congress in record time.

There were virtually no hearings held,

no consultation with experts who knew something about drug abuse.

Man: The yeas are 97, the nays are 2.

This is something that had to be dealt with,

and of course, you know, election year fever

did take hold of some people.

Narrator: With overwhelming support,

Ronald Reagan signed into law an unprecedented array

of mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes.

But no drug would receive harsher penalties than crack.

The penalties were outrageous.

That is, the penalty for crack cocaine

was made 100 times more punitive than for powder cocaine.

Newscaster: The acceptance of coke is widespread,

commonplace among professionals.

Ogletree: Whites were using powder cocaine

in boardrooms, in suburban America;

Blacks were using crack cocaine in public housing

and on the street,

and what's the response?

Just wiped me out, straight off the map for nothing.

57 years for this small rock, you know.

You know what I'm saying?

I want to know why I'm being like I murdered somebody,

you know.

Narrator: Over time as the number of blacks

in America's prisons for drug crimes skyrocketed

for outpacing the number of whites,

many people, including many judges,

began to question the disparity in sentencing

between crack and powder.

Bennett: Well, that's the major reason

why we agreed to be interviewed.

In my view, it is not fair to have a 100:1 disparity

in the difference between powder cocaine and crack cocaine,

and let me explain what that means.

A crack defendant with 5 grams of crack cocaine

is treated the same as a powder cocaine defendant

with 100 times more weight.

In other words, 500 grams of powder cocaine.

And I don't think most people realize this.

What is the difference between powder cocaine

and crack cocaine? Do you know?

All crack cocaine comes from powder cocaine.

The difference is you add baking soda, water,

and heat from an oven.

That's the only difference.

Woman: I run a group called

families against mandatory minimums.

I started it in 1991.

I think what I didn't know was how incredibly hard it would be

to change the laws.

Narrator: Julie Stewart first learned about the severity

of mandatory minimums when a family member was picked up

on marijuana charges.

After my brother was arrested

and sentenced to 5 years in prison,

I started meeting other families

whose kids were in for so much longer.

And I realized my brother was lucky he only got 5 years.

Crack penalties are ridiculously disproportionate

to all other drugs.

Narrator: In her fight against mandatory minimums,

Julie took her cause to the U.S. sentencing commission,

where she found a powerful and unlikely ally.

I'm Billy Wilkins,

and I was the first federal judge in the nation

selected by president Ronald Reagan

to serve as the first chair of

the United States sentencing commission.

Stewart: In 1995, the sentencing commission

actually voted to make crack and powder cocaine exactly the same.

Now, is crack a dangerous drug? Yes, it is.

Is it highly addictive? Yes, it is.

But the commission looked at this on many occasions

and found that sentencing crack cocaine 100:1 was unjust.

There can be no doubt that the higher penalties

for crack offenders falls disproportionately

on minority defendants.

51% of the crack is used by the white population.

In Los Angeles, California,

there has not been 1 white conviction, not 1.

Narrator: Yet despite the evidence

presented by judges and experts,

congress was unyielding,

insistent on maintaining the crack/powder disparity.

I must just tell you in my view at least

the findings are very vulnerable.

These people are killing our kids.

These people are disrupting society.

These people are wrecking our society.

[Gavel raps]

Woman: All rise.

United States district court is now in session.

The honorable mark w. Bennett presiding.

I don't think people understand really how crucial this is,

how serious this is, what's really going on.

Bennett: Looking at Maurice's case today,

he's facing a double mandatory minimum

from 10 years to 20 years.

Does he deserve a 20-year sentence?

I don't think so.

Narrator: In 2005, after years of concern from the bench

about unfair sentencing,

the supreme court ruled that judges should be given back

a certain degree of discretion

to determine what a fair sentence should be.

In response, judge Bennett did something historic.

Yes, I'm the first United States district court judge...

To do a 1:1 sentencing ratio

between crack and powder cocaine.

Haltiwanger: Judge Bennett gave me a 1:1 ratio

instead of 100:1.

So he took my guideline from, like, 30 years

to, like, I think I was under 10 years or right at 10 years,

but it didn't help.

Bennett: In Maurice's case today,

the justice was trumped by the mandatory minimum.

Narrator: Judge Bennett's decision to use a 1:1 ratio

turns out to have been largely symbolic

since congress' complex system of mandatory minimums

has the final say.

Haltiwanger: The minimum of conspiracy is 10 years,

and then with me having a prior drug felony,

the minimum is 20 years, so I got a 20-year sentence today.

Narrator: This has backfired.

I mean, if I go around the country

and I see all the people in jail

for unbelievable sentences, how did this go wrong?

Well, I don't know that it went wrong,

it just I guess the system worked,

the system worked the way congress planned for it to work.

They're not gonna come home and campaign

on the fact that I'm for more lenient sentences

for drug dealers.

Taking on the drug cartel and winning the drug war!

Bennett: Just the opposite.

I'm gonna come home and campaign

that I want tough sentences for drug dealers.

I just think we need tougher sentencing.

Bennett: But whether congress started out with race in mind

or not, it turns out in fact and in practice

that minorities are targeted by these mandatory minimums,

100:1 ratio, more than others are,

and that's not good.

Stewart: And it's very interesting,

because African Americans do not use crack cocaine

any more than whites.

In fact, whites use it more.

African Americans make up 13% of the population in the U.S.,

and they are about 13% of the crack users.

In other words, the rest of the users are white and brown,

which is kind of amazing

because 90% of the crack cocaine defendants in the federal system

are African American.

Hart: I came back to South Florida for multiple reasons.

To attend a scientific meeting.

And to attend some court proceedings.

And of course I'm here to see my family 'cause they're all here.

Narrator: Like so many people I met

in the world of the drug war,

Carl hart's story turned out to be far more complex

that I'd originally understood.

After overcoming great odds to break out of his past,

Carl suddenly found himself drawn back

into the world he had left behind.

Man: And on the other charge,

the possession of cocaine charge

you'll be pleading no contest?

Yes, sir.

Hart: So Tobias is my son who I found out was my son

about 8 or 9 years ago.

He was 16 when I found out, and Tobias is now 26.

9 years later I'm still struggling with it

because I am responsible for this person being here,

but yet I had no influence on how this person was shaped.

Right now, he has 2 open charges.

He has a cocaine charge.

It's not encouraging.

So your situation,

how are you doing business-wise?

Surviving?

I ain't too good.

Christmas around the corner gonna look ugly.

Yeah?

You should also make sure you get

a little, small legitimate gig.

I don't care what it pays

because... all right.

Well, hang on, hang on, just hear me out.

The thing is, I'm just afraid

that you go before a judge

and then they're gonna say,

"how are you getting your loot?"

All them kids, I ain't gonna be able

to take care of any kid with no $8.00, $7.00 an hour.

You know, you can do whatever you want in life,

but if you got all this stuff

hanging over your head,

you're gonna be shackled by the system.

Please, man, just do those little, small things

that I ask you to do, you know?

All right, so I'm out, man.

All right, bro.

See you later.

All right.

Hart: And it's just difficult because I know his fate.

I mean, it's the same we grew up with,

so it's these cycles.

You know, particularly in light of what I'm trying to do

with my life, it's just sad.

Ok, so about 35 million Americans

report using some illicit drug

in the past year, but there's this sort of general belief

that black people are using drugs

disproportionate to their numbers in the population.

I like to see empirical evidence be used

in our shaping of public policy.

Now, all of this was completely missed in the hysteria

in the mid-'80s and '90s about crack cocaine.

Narrator: After spending so much of his career studying drugs

and drug laws in the black community,

Carl's focus has turned to a new drug

and a new target for law enforcement.

There is a new drug epidemic in the United States.

Methamphetamines, or meth. Like crack in the 1980s,

meth is cheap, potent, and leads addicts to serious crimes.

Woman: All across America, we've got people

who are trying to lure children into using meth.

Hart: By the 1990s, we were seeing a similar phenomenon

with methamphetamine as we saw with crack cocaine.

The said meth would help me get through my exams.

Hart: But the people who are primarily associated

with methamphetamine use are poor white folks

in trailer parks.

Newscaster: A fully operational methamphetamine lab.

Hart: And also gay folks, 2 sort of despised groups.

We don't like that at all.

We can't stand people like that.

When we think about the country's response

to methamphetamine,

methamphetamine users have been vilified.

And the reason we have to recognize it

is so we can be careful or more critical

than we were with crack cocaine.

Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri,

this is the heartland of the methamphetamine problem.

How many of you are here on meth sentences then?

Wow.

Now, how many of you did I personally sentence?

[Snickering]

Man: For along time,

crack cocaine was the drug that was populating the prisons.

Methamphetamine, though, has rapidly caught up with it

and probably overtaken it.

Bennett: Today, the average person I sentence in a drug case

is a nonviolent blue collar worker

who lost their job

and then turned to manufactured methamphetamine

to support their habit.

And we treat them like they're kingpins.

[Guitar playing]

Narrator: With their rates of incarceration rising,

white inmates have started to received

the kind of harsh sentences that blacks have faced all along.

Hey, what's going, man?

� If I leave here tomorrow

� would you still remember me?

Man: My name's Kevin knott.

My number's 203093.

I'm in here for trafficking methamphetamine.

I start my 14th year in just a couple months,

and I will be here until I die.

Yeah. I have life without parole for 3 ounces of methamphetamine.

� 'Cause I'm as free as a bird now �

[humming]

Ha ha!

I can't remember it, man. It's been too long.

Yep, I've... Up, but I don't think I should die for it.

I have life without parole, which means I'll stay in prison

until I die.

That's a death sentence in my opinion...

A slow death sentence...

That I have to wait until I die.

The reason I started with meth is 'cause I got laid off.

Somebody said, "here, try to sell some of this"

and get you a little extra money."

And then I started using it,

and then I had to sell it to pay for it.

Narrator: How much is 3 ounces of methamphetamine?

It will fit in a small envelope.

If you've been busted for 2 prior drug charges,

smoking pot or having pot or methamphet,

whatever it is, and then you get a trafficking charge,

they give you life without parole.

It's mandatory, life without parole.

Kevin has always been a good son.

That's Kevin. Ha ha!

You got to see this.

That same sweet little boy.

Kevin's father was drafted and was sent to Vietnam.

He looks very much like a boy, he was a boy.

He went to Vietnam and came home a very damaged boy.

He saw people that were maimed, injured, shot and killed,

and I think he became addicted to heroin

to help ease his personal pain.

After losing Kevin's dad, Kevin kind of stepped up

and felt like he was the man of the household.

Kevin: When I first came in, there was only a few of us,

5 or 6 at the most.

A couple years ago, I heard that there were 92 people

in the state of Oklahoma

that had life without parole for drugs.

And it just keeps growing.

Hey. Yeah?

You got a visitor.

All right.

I fought it, and it's over with.

It's been over with probably 9 years.

I took it all the way to the supreme court,

and they wouldn't hear it.

So... Here I am waiting for the law to change

or something, commutation from the governor,

I don't know.

The time I've been locked up,

my mother has lost 2 of her brothers,

1 of her brother's daughters directly related to drugs.

Hi, mom. Hi, honey.

And then my sister, my youngest sister,

8 years younger than me was coming to visit me in prison

at granite and died in a car wreck.

It's been pretty bad for my mom.

She's pretty strong.

Ogletree: Today people have to understand

that the drug war is actually a war on all Americans,

and I think people keep saying, "well, that's about them."

Well, no, it's about you.

No one ever imagined when they saw so many African Americans

getting locked up, getting long sentences

that is would apply beyond the black community.

But it does.

Newscaster: Unemployment at 9%,

America is struggling through the worst recession since...

Different newscaster: No prospects of an immediate end

to the recession.

Different newscaster: Thousands of people,

jobless and hopeless look for a way out

and find trouble instead.

Before I got hooked on drugs, I looked down on drug addicts,

and then I became one.

Oftentimes we hate what we fear,

like this guy here, he was a drug dealer,

so I would look down upon him, too.

And I turned into a drug addict, a drug dealer.

Simon: You know, a funny thing happened

on the way to the 21st century,

which is that we shrugged off so much of our manufacturing base,

so much of our need for organized labor,

for a legitimate union wage, for union benefits,

for the types of jobs on which you could raise a family

and be a meaningful citizen.

We got rid of so much of that that, oops,

we marginalized a lot of white people.

Newscaster: 1 in every 8 Americans has had to visit

a food bank over the last year.

Simon: And lo and behold,

white people, when they're marginalized,

when they are denied meaning or they are denied meaningful work,

they become drug addicts, too.

And they become involved in the methamphetamine trade,

and they start turning themselves over

to the underground economies

that are the only ones there to accept them.

Capitalism is fairly colorblind in the end.

Our economic engine, when it doesn't need somebody,

it doesn't need somebody

and it doesn't give a damn who you are.

White people found out a little bit later than black folk,

but they found it out.

Narrator: After hearing so much

about the failure of the drug war

and the enormous harm it does,

I wanted to better understand what drives it.

Far from the frontlines of the war,

I discovered a vast and less visible world of people

who I their own ways play a part.

This chair in comparison

to other types of restraint chairs

is the most humane.

The person in the chair can breathe very easily

and it's not restrictive.

[Indistinct yelling]

There it is.

Ha ha!

The war on drugs has to be a war at every level.

It has to be a war on the streets of the cities.

It has to be a war at the state level.

And it has to be a war at the federal level.

It's just like fighting the war on terrorism.

Man: Before in the prisons,

I guess the only choice was you could get a torah or a Bible.

Things have changed now.

Anybody want their free copy?

All sorts of people start to get a vested interest,

a financial interest in keeping the system going.

Woman: Well, we're in the business

of supplying corrections with products.

It's a growing market, prisons.

There's a lot of prisoners in the United States.

That's what I mean by...

now you've got me feeling awkward because of the camera.

Put it down.

Man: This company, cca,

we are the leader and the largest in the world

as far as private prisons and jails.

We are profitable.

We're highly rated in the stock market.

It hones our ability to it less expensively

because we have to earn a profit.

There's a whole range of corporations,

the taser gun manufacturers,

private healthcare providers,

phone companies, whole communities

that now depend on prisons as their primary employer,

now, deeply invested in the drug war

and the system of mass incarceration.

Miller: And all these people

are not trying to do anything wrong.

They're trying to make society better.

But their actions combined together

become part of the thrust

that makes the bad parts of the drug war

more feasible and more practical.

The thing with the war on drugs is

and the question we have to ask is,

not why is it a failure,

but why, given that it seems to be a failure,

why is it persistent?

And I'm beginning to think, maybe it's a success.

What if it's a success by keeping police forces busy?

What if it's a success by keeping private jails thriving?

What if it's a success keeping a legal establishment

justified in its self-generated activity?

Maybe it's a success on different terms,

than the publicly stated ones.

Narrator: Perhaps not surprisingly

it was people on the inside who turned out to be most aware

of the dangerous pressures that outside forces

exert on the system.

Carpenter: My job is to keep the people inside

who are supposed to be inside, and I'm gonna do my job.

But as I've come along in corrections

over the last 20 years,

I've just kind of watched it grow into this thing.

I mean, it's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You build a bed, they fill the bed.

They start sucking in money at an astronomical rate,

and it just grows and grows and grows of its own accord.

You almost can't stop it.

You can't afford to stop it.

And so now you start talking about,

well, you know, we can cut some corners and we can reduce.

What about if we reduce by closing that facility?

Newscaster: Employees are hoping the governor will reconsider

his plan to close the prison.

Carpenter: Well, wait a minute. You can't do that.

My community will dry up and blow away.

The private prisons, they actually go to a town and say,

if you'll use your tax money

to buy the land and build the facility,

we'll rent it from you, and you'll get rich,

and we'll get rich, and we'll all be rich together.

Well, that only works if there's prisoners in the beds.

So now you're starting to find people that fit the criteria,

now you actually can pay people to go out and look for people

that fit the criteria, and now it's gonna grow faster.

You can't let that town fail,

so you can't change the way you think about locking people up.

Narrator: So you need a new enemy.

It's the same enemy, you just need more of 'em.

Narrator: Though my journey had begun with a simple question

about 1 person's life,

it was forcing me to confront unsettling realities

facing the country.

And yet the full weight of the situation

had still not been revealed to me

in its darkest historical terms.

Simon: Say it this way 'cause it's more honest.

Instead of saying let's get rid of all these drug addicts

and drug dealers,

and once we throw away the key on them,

we'll solve this problem.

Why don't you try saying it to yourself this way.

All these Americans that we don't need anymore,

the factories are closed, we don't need them,

you know, the textile mills are gone,

gm is closing plants, we don't need these people.

You're extra Americans. We don't need 'em.

Let's just get rid of the bottom 15% of the country.

Let's lock 'em up.

In fact, let's see if we can make money off locking them up

in the short term even though it's gonna be

an incredible burden for our society,

even though it's gonna destroy these families,

you know, where these people are probably integral

to the lives of other Americans, let's just get rid of them,

you know?

And at that point, why don't you just say kill the poor?

If we kill the poor, we're gonna be a lot better off,

because that's what the drug war has become.

Miller: My father was a war crimes investigator

in Europe after world war ii.

And we often talked about his experiences.

I was reading the work of Raul hilberg,

who wrote about the destruction of European Jews

and the holocaust.

We've long known that the process of destruction

was an undertaking step by step.

Miller: I realized that there was a chain of destruction,

that what he was talking about could be expressed

by links in a chain around the world

in more than 1 society.

People do the same things again and again,

decade after decade, century after century.

Now, this chain of destruction begins with the phase

we can call identification,

in which a group of people is identified as a cause

for problems of society.

People start to perceive their fellow citizens

as bad or evil.

They used to be worthwhile people,

but now all of a sudden for some reason,

their lives are worthless.

The second link in the chain of destruction is ostracism,

by which we learn how to hate these people,

how to take their jobs away,

how to make it harder for them to survive.

People lose their place to live.

Often they're forced into ghettoes,

where they're physically isolated,

separate from the rest of society.

The third link is confiscation.

People lose their rights, civil liberties.

The laws themselves change so it's made easier

for people to be stopped on the street,

patted down, searched,

and for their property to be confiscated.

Now, once you start taking people's property away,

you can start taking the people themselves away.

And the fourth link is concentration.

Concentrate them into facilities such as prisons, camps.

People lose their rights.

They can't vote anymore, have children anymore.

Often their labor is exploited in a very systematic form.

And the final link in the chain of destruction

is annihilation.

Now, this might be indirect

by, say, withholding medical care,

withholding food, preventing further births.

Or it might be direct where death is inflicted,

where people are deliberately killed.

These steps tend to happen of their own momentum,

without anybody forcing them to happen.

I think a lot of people would be disturbed and outraged

by the thought that any part of this process

could be going on in America.

But it wasn't until I began studying the drug war

that I realized that some of these same steps were happening.

For instance, identification.

All of us agree that the greatest domestic threat

facing our nation today is drugs.

Bowden: The way to take a problem

and make it a huge problem

is first you ask the wrong question,

and then you feed us the wrong answer.

Bush: Who's responsible?

Let me tell you straight out...

everyone who uses drugs, everyone who sells drugs,

and everyone who looks the other way.

Bien: You identify people, their characteristics,

you make them other using fear mongering,

as if they're the cause of our problems.

These people are killing our kids.

These people are disrupting society.

These people are wrecking our society.

Miller: Secondly, ostracism.

Society learns to hate drug users.

If you are a casual drug user, you are an accomplice to murder.

[Applause]

You apply special laws to them that don't apply to others.

Miller: Now all of a sudden these people

who have previously just been identified as drug users

become criminals.

Bill Clinton: If you break the law,

you no longer have a home in public housing.

Kaufman: The ultimate effect is isolation,

being cut off from mainstream society.

Carpenter: We start it out, we identify them,

we figure out who they are, then we start making laws

to prevent them from being around our children.

You push them out of the places where they may be successful,

and so where do they go?

Simon: The area of the last opposition,

the modern American ghetto.

We manage to isolate the poor economically.

Carpenter: You force them out of the place

where they could live and work and possibly be successful,

and now you make them... you make them criminals.

Simon: So once the economics has done its business,

then you can add different levels of policing.

You can change the rules.

You're under arrest.

For what?

You've got a bench warrant.

Probably for drugs.

Woman: Hey, guys, you know the program.

Get your hands up, turn around.

Miller: Confiscation. Any property they find on you

can be subjected to civil forfeiture.

That money's ours now. That's my money now.

Newscaster: Federal and local police

seized these vehicles after their occupants

allegedly purchased cocaine and other drugs.

Miller: If we're seizing their property,

it's really a simple next step to seizing their persons.

Newscaster: Holloway was arrested on charges

of resisting arrest

and wandering with the intent to buy drugs.

Alexander: In the drug war,

there's more that's being confiscated.

What's being taken from them is all hope in a future.

Woman: What y'all getting him for?

Don't worry. We caught him with narcotics.

With the drug war, we've gone as far as the concentration phase.

Bowden: My government says we're fighting a heroic war

against drugs and a war against people who use drugs.

And frankly a lot of them

are just going to have to be locked up.

Bien: Extraordinary numbers of people are in prison

because of drugs,

yet it is not a place to get drug treatment.

They come out, and then we're surprised

that we have the highest recidivism rates,

and that results in this cycle of incarceration

and overcrowding.

Kaufman: This concentration of people,

whether it's in inner city ghettos

or in prisons, creates a culture of hopelessness

that is incredibly corrosive.

When they don't have any prospects,

people turn to drugs.

And then we'll pursue them and we'll be able to hire

a bunch of prison guards and parole officers

and narcotics detectives and drug treatment people.

In the short term, some people have jobs.

Miller: Annihilation.

That's not happening with the drug war in this country.

But there are subtle but real ways

that don't involve indiscriminant mass killings,

such as preventing births.

Man: $200 cash payments to women addicted to crack

to be sterilized.

Violence in prisons.

Newscaster: Severe overcrowding sparked jailhouse riots.

Different newscaster: 27 inmates died yesterday.

Miller: People swept up in drug war violence.

Newscaster: 140 drug killings this year.

Different newscaster: An Iraqi war veteran was killed

after SWAT team officers stormed his Tucson, Arizona, home

in a drug raid that turned up no drugs.

Miller: Now it's important to remember or to realize

it isn't that the war on drug users is the same

as what happened in other societies,

but that both are wars on ordinary people,

people who are just like us.

Carpenter: You've got to have an enemy for everything.

The way that Germany in the '30s rebuilt their infrastructure,

rebuilt their industries and rebuilt their pride,

their nationalism was by saying that these people,

this group of people is the cause of all of our woe,

and if we hate them, we'll be better off.

Narrator: Or not doing it at all.

I don't think it's to that extreme,

but we do say those people are bad for us,

and if we hate them, our lives will be better.

So everybody's got to have an enemy.

The drug war is a holocaust in slow motion.

And it's not somebody arguing racial superiority

or arguing for the destruction of a given race or religion.

That doesn't exist.

Let's be honest about what was unique to the holocaust.

But... There is an incredible destruction of human life

that is class-fixed, not race-fixed, but class-fixed

that is going on and is going on under the guise

of a war against illegal narcotics.

[Radio playing indistinctly]

The first time seeing her, right?

They don't even know who...

Johnson: I mean, I know they want people to learn a lesson,

but to be honest, all of this time

is not really helping anybody,

especially my daughter.

All it's doing is making her grow up like me,

like the cycle is just continuing, you know?

That was a letter that was written by your aunt.

She wrote it to the judge.

I ain't never read it, man.

"Dear judge Bennett, I just wanted you to know

"a little bit about Maurice.

"When he was 6 months old, his father was murdered.

"That was a sad day.

"My sister then began using drugs,

and soon after our young kid's lives..."

Correia: All the years I spent in narcotics,

I didn't go out there every day and say,

"hell, let's inflict some harm on the community."

I think, you know, an unintended consequence was that,

yeah, we probably did, you know, we probably did inflict harm.

Man: 2 young kids with the mother.

Chism: Kevin has been locked up 13 years.

So now we write letters and we call and we email

and just with the prayer that somebody will hear us

because our day will come, and I believe it will come.

I don't think my son is gonna die in prison.

Walking away and leaving him is the hardest thing that I do.

Carpenter: I don't know what the solution is.

But I know that the solution can't be more

of what's got us to this spot.

It can't be more of the same.

Mate: America's drug problem,

a result of hundreds of years of history,

economic policy, social policy, and misunderstanding.

So let's not make the most visible manifestation of it,

that is to say people being out there in the street and using

the problem.

It's not the problem.

It's simply a manifestation of our problem.

It's simply a symptom.

It's sort of like saying that the problem with pneumonia

is that you cough.

Let's suppress the cough and that's ok.

Well, you can suppress the cough.

That lung will still be inflamed.

And that lung tissue is still being damaged.

You got to deal with the whole picture.

Narrator: After 40 years of incalculable

human and economic cost,

it's hard to imagine how something so deeply rooted

in American life can possibly be changed.

Man: Mr. chair, we find ourselves as a nation

in the midst of a profound, deeply corrosive crisis

that we have largely been ignoring at our peril.

Narrator: But at many levels across the country,

there are people trying to change things.

Man: After 30 years,

all of my colleagues who are afraid for the politics,

we have to go a different way.

Ogletree: You have never had so many people on the same side

of this issue because we fought a war.

We've been unsuccessful.

Man: Let's return to the focus

on prevention of crime.

How do we prevent people from becoming drug addicts?

How do we prevent people from being incarcerated?

Too many people in jail that don't need to be there.

There's a lot that is not working.

Narrator: In recent months, under increasing public pressure

the first signs have emerged that the drug war,

after decades of failure and unsustainable cost

may indeed be changing.

Newscaster: Congress took action today

to fix what many have called

a very unfair gap in federal sentencing rules

for crack cocaine as opposed to powder cocaine.

President Obama signed a new law at the white house today

cutting the ratio to 18:1.

Mauer: We view that as a compromise.

We view that as not providing full justice,

and we won't rest after that's adopted.

Narrator: Yet despite a few first steps toward reform,

those experienced with criminal justice

know it will take more than experts, activists,

and a handful of courageous lawmakers

to undo the damage that decades of drug laws have caused.

Simon: Understand that the political infrastructure

is so wedded to the status quo,

that they're so consumed with the next election

that there will never emerge a shred of leadership

that will change the situation.

It's up to us.

Man: When do we want it? All: Right now!

Man: When do we want it? All: Now!

No longer can drug laws serve as a stimulus package

for prison communities on the back of poor people.

Stewart: My takeaway from the past 15 years

isn't that we need to wait until we get consensus.

It's that we need to do what's right.

If there are people like this body

who are the sentencing experts

that are supposed to tell congress

and tell the public what the right thing to do is,

I just urge you to do it.

Man: I believe it is in the interest of every American

that we thoroughly examine our entire criminal justice system,

bien: You need to care about that person down the block

because the same rights that they have, you have.

And if you let their rights be compromised,

your rights are compromised.

At some point, you have to stand up and say it's not ok.

Haltiwanger: You know, if anything's

ever is gonna be done about this, if this is gonna change,

it's gonna have to come from the people out there,

they're gonna have to help, you know.

We can't do it from in here.

Bennett: Do you know what it's like to go home at night

knowing that you did a personal injustice.

I did an injustice to Maurice.

Man: I'll amend the charge on her

to a violation of unlawful possession of marijuana,

22105.

Narrator: Back in 2008, when I began filming,

despite the excitement

surrounding the election of Barack Obama,

the thoughts nannie jeter shared that night

would stay with me more than any other.

Nannie: I feel I cheated myself

out of what I could have accomplished,

like I never knew that I wanted to be in politics,

to be a voice for someone, to say what was wrong,

will it be changed or not,

but to make known that it's wrong.

I've learned so much and I try to tell it to other people,

but it's like people would rather go down

the same road that you went down before they learn.

You make mistakes through life.

It's like mistakes is always there.

You make a lot of mistakes with your life.

But when you somehow blow your kid's life,

you always think about it.

Obama: But above all,

I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to.

It belongs to you.

[Cheering]

Nannie: I don't understand the war on drugs.

All I know is...

I miss my son.

Announcer: "Independent lens" continues

with a short film "as I am" by Alan spearman.

Man: Imagine your dreams.

See what you've been through.

Think about yourself...

Where you're going...

Where you're from.

Think about the dreams you've had...

The nightmares you've had.

I used to have nightmares

that I would be stuck in a storm drain.

People would walk past me for days

and leave me down there,

and I would see and hear everything.

I would see people selling and buying drugs,

folks fighting, hookers, hustlers.

Street life.

My hands and arms would just be sticking out,

and nobody would help me.

I can't pull myself out on my own.

People just keep walking past me

like I didn't exist.

What if I was never born?

I shouldn't be here.

I died when I was two.

Tell you the truth...

[Heartbeat]

The doctors gave up on me.

God brought me back.

I always think I got to be here for a reason.

My dad got murdered, shot more than 20 times

on the same streets that I walk today.

You got to know the cuts.

Sometimes, the lines in our hands intersect

like the cuts in the hood.

You just got to feel your way through.

We take shortcuts to stay out of sight,

but they just keep us out of mind.

Where I'm from, ain't no rose bushes.

They just sticky bushes.

I've had the same exact dream

over a thousand times.

I keep throwing money out of a helicopter

to the homeless people.

It's a day-to-day struggle

and an everyday hustle.

You do what you have to.

No matter what it is,

you do what you got to do.

We don't know what they been through.

We don't know their story.

People just looking for a hand.

They say there's a better life,

but when you go out there looking for that better life,

you don't get no help when you try to do the right thing.

The streets taught me to be hard.

It's hard.

Most times, it's too hard.

I shouldn't be here

in a blank state, in a city with no fight,

in an area code with no hope,

in a house with no lights,

in a body with no soul,

in a mind with no goals.

I shouldn't be here.

This state shouldn't be my life.

Am I lucky to be unfortunate?

When we dream, we enter an empty space

that's filled with hope.

Stuff happens every day,

stuff you shouldn't get used to,

but you do.

Most stuff just make you want to give up.

They know deep down inside that they'll never

have a mansion or smell the ocean,

but they'll never admit it

because their minds don't work like that.

You can only try so hard to pull yourself out,

and if you can't,

you gonna pull somebody down with you.

Friends turn to foe.

Family turn into people you just don't know.

The streets are cold

even in the summer.

Two blocks from the hood, it's a whole new world,

but why?

Is there a new world two blocks from the hood?

More importantly, why is the hood two blocks

from the new world?

How far can a flip go?

I don't know anyone who can say they walked

in my shoes and made it out of the hood.

What I do know is we're meant to connect,

to find each other.

Eyes to see,

hands to feel,

hearts to love.

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Thank you.