John Oliver Makes Case For Scrubbing Mandatory Prison Sentence Minimums
John Oliver made the case for doing away with mandatory minimums that require fixed prison sentences for certain crimes, on his HBO comedy series Last Week Tonight.
Two weeks earlier, President Obama announced in a Facebook video that he had commuted the sentences of 46 non-violent federal drug offenders he felt had already served sentences disproportionate to their crimes, and would call for more sentencing reform.
Oliver, in last night’s program, also touched on the economic meltdown in Greece, advertisers finally demanding audiences with FIFA about reform plans, but declined to discuss Donald Trump because, he explained, “who gives a shit about what he says.”
Collecting information previously reported in The Washington Post and other newspapers for his non-newspaper reading audience, Oliver noted Obama had granted clemency to 46 non-violent drug offenders, the largest number of commutations by a president in one day since the 1960’s. This brings Obama’s total to 89, not counting his annual presidential Thanksgiving Day turkey pardons.
The minimum sentences ignore context, Oliver explained, and were made the rule in the 80’s and 90’s. Today, one out of every 100 adults in this country is locked up, totaling 2 million and at this rate we soon will have enough incarcerated people to populate an entire new country, Oliver said. “And trust me when I say that is not a good idea,” he added, noting that the “only good thing to come out of that experiment [aka Australia] was Hugh Jackman – and that took 180 years.”
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