In the latest episode of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, comedian John Oliver turned his attention to America’s prison system. (It’s not the first time that he has weighed in on the justice system, an earlier episode saw him tackle America’s use of the death penalty.) On Sunday, Oliver brought his brand of fact-checked comedy to incarceration:
We have over two million people behind bars right now. We have more prisoners at the moment than China- than China! We don’t have more of anything than China, other than, of course, debt to China.
For 17 minutes Oliver, took aim at everything from the War on Drugs (“our drug laws do seem to be a little draconian, and a lot racist”) to private prison companies, as well as corporations who provide food and health services in prison.
Oliver lampooned an appearance before a Senate committee by the Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Charles Samuels, in which he struggled to answer a question about the size of solitary confinement cells. (Samuels wrongly gave the size of an isolation cell as 6 x4 feet, before correcting himself.) Samuels clarified that the cells are in fact 7 x 10 feet, or as Oliver put it “plenty of room for a ping pong table and an imaginary opponent as your mind slowly becomes untethered.”
The former guest host of the Daily Show also took a more serious look at the use of prison rape as a comic punchline:
We are somehow collectively able to laugh about references to the fact that 4% of prisoners reported being sexually victimized in the last year.
SPECIAL DEAL: Subscribe to our award-winning print magazine, a publication Bernie Sanders calls "unapologetically on the side of social and economic justice," for just $1 an issue! That means you'll get 10 issues a year for $9.95.
