John Oliver devoted 17 minutes of his show Sunday to examining an American prison system he said was racist, oblivious to rape and increasingly run by private contractors.
“That’s true. We have over 2 million behind bars right now,” Oliver explained. “We have more prisoners at the moment than China. Than China. We don’t have more anything than China — other than of course debt to China.”
Pointing out that America’s prison population has expanded eight-fold since 1970, Oliver stated, “The only other thing that has grown at that rate, since the seventies, is varieties of Cheerios.”