{"id":10725,"date":"2014-07-21T12:46:28","date_gmt":"2014-07-21T19:46:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bradblog.com\/?p=10725"},"modified":"2014-07-21T19:27:13","modified_gmt":"2014-07-22T02:27:13","slug":"hbos-this-week-tonight-knocks-it-out-of-park-on-americas-shameful-prison-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bbnewdb.webbyspice.com\/?p=10725","title":{"rendered":"HBO’s ‘Last Week Tonight’ Knocks It Out of Park on America’s Shameful Prison Problems"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the weeks since its debut on HBO, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver<\/i><\/a> has slowly, if assuredly, evolved from being little more than a weekend knockoff of its progenitor The Daily Show<\/i>, to finding its own unique voice and ability to take advantage of the more in-depth “coverage” afforded by the lack of self-censorship otherwise required for commercial television and longer segments due to the lack of on-the-clock commercial breaks necessary for its Comedy Central brethren.<\/p>\n

That maturity and evolution revealed itself in full flower during last night’s lengthy segment on America’s horrific and insane — and getting horrificker and insaner — prison and incarceration policy.<\/p>\n

Aside from being really really funny at times, the lengthy segment was one of the smartest, most complete, most accessible treatises I’ve seen on TV — or anywhere really — in a very long time, if ever.<\/p>\n

It concludes with a laugh-out-loud Sesame Street<\/i>-style song on the broken state of America’s prison policy, after covering obscenities along the way such as the explosive growth in our prison population; the failed “War on Drugs”; racial disparities in sentencing; our grotesque cultural fetish with “hysterical” prison rape humor; some fairly jaw-dropping Congressional testimony (courtesy of Sen. Al Franken); to the privatization and profiteering of the national Prison Industrial Complex which has culminated, as a judge described<\/a> in 2012, in “a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts”.<\/p>\n

This smart piece is well worth watching in full for too many reasons to list here…<\/p>\n