On this weekend’s Last Week Tonight, John Oliver points out that leaving prison is usually depicted as a happy moment in movies and television, but that the reality can sometimes be very different. The national rate of recidivism—released prisoners who end up going back—is 50 percent. There are many reasons, including poverty, hunger, lack of housing, and the difficulty in finding a job. Society has a way of treating former prisoners like they’re still behind bars, and discrimination can often make bad problems worse—in one absurd case, a Pennsylvania ex-con was forced to sell drugs in order to pay his parole fees. Watch above as Oliver lays out the problems inherent to the system in a typically insightful, and somehow funny, segment.
(There’s a joke involving SpongeBob and the Aryan Brotherhood, and man, is it good.)
Oliver also followed up on the Washington Redskins saga, taking the team to ask for the hypocrisy of their latest legal gambit. Watch that here. The original Redskins segment, from last summer, can be seen here.