Brow Beat

Seth Meyers Checks In With the Private Prison Industry

What with all the hubbub about Republicans trying to kill people lately, it’s been easy to forget that they also want to lock up as many people as possible, ideally while getting rich in the process. To remind us, Seth Meyers took a break from his usual mad dash through Trump’s daily fuckups for a slightly wider view of the private prison industry (framed by a mad dash through Trump’s fuckups on a slightly longer time frame). It turns out private prisons are cruel and bad, so naturally Trump is doing what he can to make more of them.

The segment is structured more like a John Oliver or Samantha Bee editorial than Meyers’ usual Weekend Update style, which has got to be difficult to research and put together for a daily format. It’s also not easy to do a complicated subject justice in the limited time a network late night show allows: When Oliver talked about private prisons, he took 17 minutes; Meyers gets seven and spends two of them making jokes about the presidency being like a prison. On the other hand, private prisons aren’t that complicated an issue: How much airtime do you need to explain that it’s wrong to make money by locking kids up for stealing nutmeg? The ways nightmare factories like the GEO Group and CoreCivic are thriving under Trump by is the kind of thing we would all be screaming about 24 hours a day, if we weren’t spending that time screaming about even more flamboyantly evil schemes. So thanks to Seth Meyers for the healthy reminder: We should all make a little time to kick back, disengage from the churn of the news cycle, and get in touch with all the other ways Republicans are trying to make the country worse for everyone.