John Oliver, puppets take on the prison system


On Sunday's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, the host dedicated a segment to discussing the prison system in the United States, which he believes is "fundamentally broken." Oliver noted that so many people are incarcerated it has become something Sesame Street has to explain to kids. "Think about that, we now need adorable singing puppets to explain prison to children in the same way they explain the number seven and what the moon is," he said.
Oliver touched on everything from maggot-infested food being served to inmates to the way cost-cutting compromises health care; in one clip, a former prisoner from Arizona shared that after having a C-section in jail, doctors poured sugar into her incision and covered it with gauze, a remedy that was used in the early 1900s, pre-antibiotics. It's hard to take all of the statistics in, but luckily Oliver had some special fuzzy guests on hand to help us make sense of things. Watch the entire video below. --Catherine Garcia
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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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