John Oliver, formerly of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, has a new show on HBO, Last Week Tonight, and they dedicated a remarkable (and hilarious) 17-minutes to critique prisons and show the need for prison reform. It’s perhaps the most entertaining way to get acquainted with the issues!
In the video, he:
- Shows how minorities are affected out of all proportion with their portion of society
- How the United States has 2,000,000 prisoners at the moment, even more than China
- How even Sesame Street has been forced to deal with the issue, it being so common
- How mandatory minimums for drug offences causes longer-than-necessary sentences
- The condition of prisoners in solitary confinement
- How nonviolent offenders can be handled separately from more serious offenders
- How a significant fraction of offenders are subjected to rape
- How cost cutting at prisons is done with little regard to prisoner conditions
All done with the usual intelligent comedy we expect from such spoof news shows.
