{"id":3520,"date":"2015-07-28T10:14:07","date_gmt":"2015-07-28T14:14:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/?p=3520"},"modified":"2015-07-29T09:46:51","modified_gmt":"2015-07-29T13:46:51","slug":"mandatory-minimums","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/2015\/07\/28\/mandatory-minimums\/","title":{"rendered":"John Oliver attacks harmful mandatory minimum laws"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On Sunday, <i>Last Week Tonight&#8217;s<\/i> John Oliver tackled another pressing criminal justice issue: the troubling practice of mandatory minimums. Oliver&#8217;s 15-minute segment reveals that incarcerated people and their families aren&#8217;t alone in their fight against mandatory minimums. Even the policymakers who first created these sentences and the judges who have to hand them down think that such harsh penalties are ineffective.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nOccasional pardons may bring relief to some, but without a system-wide, retroactive change to sentencing laws, mandatory minimums will continue to do &#8220;way more harm than good.&#8221;\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/pDVmldTurqk?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/p>\n<p>\nFor related <i>Last Week Tonight<\/i> clips, see Oliver\u2019s segments on <a href=\"2014\/08\/04\/john-oliver\/\">U.S. prisons<\/a>, <a href=\"2014\/08\/19\/militarization\/\">police militarization<\/a>, <a href=\"2015\/02\/25\/judicial_elections\/\">judicial elections<\/a>, <a href=\"2015\/03\/23\/oliver-municipal-violations\/\">municipal violations<\/a>, and <a href=\"\/blog\/2015\/06\/08\/explainers\/\">bail and private police<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On Sunday, Last Week Tonight&#8217;s John Oliver tackled another pressing criminal justice issue: the troubling practice of mandatory minimums. Oliver&#8217;s 15-minute segment reveals that incarcerated people and their families aren&#8217;t alone in their fight against mandatory minimums. Even the policymakers who first created these sentences and the judges who have to hand them down think [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[29],"class_list":["post-3520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-shorts","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3520\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3520"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=3520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}