‘Exile Nation’ challenges drug policies
Filmmaker decries prison as solution
Charles Shaw considers himself a former POW of the drug war, a felon turned filmmaker who wants to expose the injustice of the mass incarceration of drug offenders, which he calls “a 40-year, one-trillion-dollar social catastrophe.”
Shaw will be in Spokane on Friday for the local premier of his documentary, “The Exile Nation Project: An Oral History of the War on Drugs & the American Criminal Justice System.”
The film, a collection of testimonials from offenders, family members and experts on the U.S. criminal justice system, is backed up by statistics that can be found on Shaw’s website, exilenation.org.
With 2.5 million people in American prisons, it says, the U.S. has more people incarcerated than China, which has five times the population.
Shaw cites a 2010 investigation by The Economist magazine that concluded, “Never in the civilized world have so many been locked up for so little.”
Washington state has 18,290 people in confinement, 9.3 percent for drug crimes. Another 18,842 are on active supervision, nearly 28 percent convicted of drug crimes.
Shaw advocates an end to the criminalization of victimless vice crimes.
“For possession and use of substance, there’s no reason on Earth why people should be churned through the criminal justice system,” he said in an interview.
The drug war, Shaw contends, was begun as a way to disrupt political movements and control immigrant populations, not to stamp out drugs.
“We use more chemicals than any society on the planet,” Shaw said. “It’s just that we’ve gotten to this point now where the vast majority of them are legal and pharmaceutical – and they also happen to be the biggest drugs of abuse and the most dangerous drugs of abuse.”
The screening of “Exile Nation” at the Magic Lantern Theater, Friday at 6 p.m., is sponsored by the November Coalition, the Colville-based nonprofit organization dedicated to ending the war on drugs and promoting the rights of prisoners arrested on drug charges. There’s a suggested $10 donation, but no one will be turned away because they can’t pay.
Look for Nora Callahan, the coalition’s founder whose brother is serving time on a federal drug-conspiracy charge, in the film.
Callahan’s alternative to the war on drugs: “Investing in what makes communities truly safe – housing, jobs and education.”
She’s not necessarily advocating legalization, Callahan said, “but the idea that we can build prisons as an answer is absurd.”