In July 2014, one of John Oliver's main segments on his show Last Week Tonight was a piece on the racism and exploitation typical of the American prison system and the national apathy it receives. After revealing that this country imprisons more people than China, Oliver explained the racial inequality built into the system, the shocking environment in which inmates live, and how “prison rape” has become a punchline in everyday media because Americans do not care about convicts that little. With so many people in prison, even Sesame Street runs segments teaching children how to cope when a parent goes to jail: “We now need adorable puppets to explain prison to children in the same way they explain the number seven or what the moon is” explains Oliver. In the debate over America’s high mass incarceration rate, it is clear that reform is the best solution because there is a strong link between overpopulation in prisons and racial prejudice, poverty, and ignorance of incarceration’s effectiveness in reducing the crime rate.

In a 2014 report circulated by the Sentencing Project, an incarceration reform advocacy group, African Americans and Hispanics are more likely than Caucasian offenders to be deprived of bail or “be imposed to a bond they cannot afford.” The study accounts that “[r]acial minorities are often assessed to be higher safety or flight risks because of their lower socioeconomic status, criminal records, and because of their race.” While African Americans make up only 13 percent of the country’s population, they make up 40 percent of the confined population – a percentage significantly greater than the amount of black South Africans confined to prisons during Apartheid.

On the other hand, African American communities deal with an increased concentration of poverty and have the greatest rate of imprisonment in the country. When someone is released from prison, they will likely return to their disadvantaged neighborhood with much less than what they owned before living behind bars. Civil rights attorney and author of "The New Jim Crow," Michelle Alexander, explains: “You’re now branded a criminal, a felon, and employment discrimination is now legal against you for the rest of your life. It doesn’t matter how long ago your conviction occurred. It doesn’t matter if it was five weeks, five years ago, 25 years ago. For the rest of your life, you have to check that box on employment applications asking have you ever been convicted of a felony.” Convicted offenders are also stripped of basic rights given to American citizens, such as the right to serve on juries, the right to vote, and the right to economic support, like food stamps and educational funding. Without these basic services, how can one be expected to stop generating an income through a life of non-violent lawbreaking?

“Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time,” is the popular proverb that comes to mind. However, research shows that the increased detention rate has, in reality, done almost nothing to suppress the crime rate in America (which has dropped since the 1980s). The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, a non-partisan public policy and law institute, reports that since 2000, the effect of the increasing detention rate of the American populace had “essentially zero” effect on the crime rate. Increased incarceration is responsible for less than 1 percent of the reduction in property crime in this century and has had little influence over the decline in violent crime in the past 24 years. Actually, the Sentencing Project released another study which states that the three states that extensively decreased their prison population – California, New Jersey, and New York – also saw a noteworthy decrease in violent crime in that period.

To deny that America has a mass imprisonment problem is a blatant rejection of not only reality, but also of the history of racist judicial practices since the 1980s that pushed the United States to have the top incarceration rate in the world. It seems like the country is reaching a newfound state of consciousness about its prison system, and hopefully that will trigger reform and a reduction in the number of felons. One in three African-American men – fathers, brothers, uncles, husbands, nephews, and grandfathers – will be imprisoned in their lives. A terrible reality for too many.