Prisons

This is so funny, so poignant, so awful, so important — you simply have to find 17 minutes to watch.  It has everything from the cast of Sesame Street to the Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons being questioned by Al Franken.

And of course it has Florida.  The governor there, Republican Rick Scott, who’s refused the Medicaid expansion money and (as noted yesterday) blocked the insurance commissioner from negotiating lower premiums, is all about privatizing the prisons and cutting back their budgets.

You have to watch.

Especially now that we have more people in prison than any nation on earth — including China.  

(Yes!  We’re number one!  USA!  U! S! A!)

Half are in for drug-related offenses, and yet an earlier Republican governor — Jeb Bush — actually cut Florida’s prison drug treatment budget by 85% to help pay for what he really cared about: a tax cut exclusively for rich people (who in Florida already paid no state income tax or estate tax, so it was quite a feat to find a way to advantage them even further).  And he did this at the same time as he was paying privately for his own daughter’s drug treatment.  Republican values.  Republican priorities.  Help not the poor and the desperate, the damaged and most needy; find yet more ways to help the best off.

But I digress.  The Jeb Bush piece is ancient history.

Watch Jon Oliver.