John Oliver discusses Joe Arpaio, racism, and presidential pardons

With all of the natural and political disasters wreaking havoc, you should take a minute to learn about Joe Arpaio. John Oliver explained why on Last Week Tonight.

Presidential pardons are one of the most powerful tools available to holders of the office. Use of a pardon, however, is not without controversy.

Among many other pardons, as Last Week Tonight‘s John Oliver cited before getting into his story, Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, a commodities trader and hedge fund manager charged with tax evasion. Rich was also the middleman for numerous oil deals with Iran during the Iran hostage crisis. Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, who, until recently, was one of the most corrupt U.S. Presidents in living memory. Even Abraham Lincoln got in some weird ones, such as when he dismissed charges against a drunken man who had tried to get randy with a horse.

This move — the pardoning — recently came back to public notice when Donald Trump pardoned controversial Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. You may have heard of Joe Arpaio and his frankly awful jails in the Arizona desert. You may have even heard a pre-Presidency Trump bloviating on the subject during a campaign speech.

Even if you’re familiar with the situation, it would serve us well if you take a few minutes to dive deeper. After all, said John Oliver, “It is far more than just the eye-catching circus you’ve seen so far.” And, as Arpaio himself sang for a documentary crew, he did it all “My Way”.

Here’s Oliver’s video (warning: contains NSFW language):

Some background

First of all, it is worth noting that Arpaio operates jails, not prisons, as Oliver points out. Jails are typically reserved for inmates who are serving either a sentence of less than a year, or who have not even been convicted at the time of their imprisonment.

And yet Arpaio ran those jails as if they contained some of the most hardened, vicious criminals America could offer. Conditions in these camps were often brutal — they were generally outdoor tents with temperatures above 100°F, where inmates were served spoiled food (such a rotten baloney sandwiches), and often only twice a day. To add further insult to injury, Arpaio made inmates wear pink underwear (which is a graduate gender studies thesis just waiting to happen) and installed cameras in a female inmates’ restroom.

Wrongful deaths

The jails were sometimes deadly, to the point where Arpaio’s office was obliged to pay out millions of dollars in wrongful death settlements. In one particularly callous case examined by Oliver, one guard alerted another to a dying inmate.

In this case, in particular, the Justice Department declined to prosecute. Arpaio was unapologetic and the guards who didn’t help were given promotions.

Believe it or not, Arpaio was also a law enforcement officer. That means he was sworn to uphold the rules and regulations of his country. Please do not be dramatically surprised when you learn that Arpaio had a particularly loose interpretation of “law” and “duty”. For example, in the course of his duties, Arpaio initiated a series of baseless civil suits. One of those suits even got a lawyer disbarred. That particular case was described as “nothing short of… fumbling with the law, like children wielding a buzzing chainsaw,” by a member of the disbarment panel.

As if that wasn’t enough, Arpaio’s lack of interest in some cases is like the rotting cherry on top a green baloney sandwich cake. For instance, his office often failed to investigate sexual assault crimes, including those involving minors. Arpaio casually apologized to victims, “if there were any”. It should not surprise you to learn that many of these ignored assaults happened within the local immigrant community, though it should at least add another anxious knot to your gut.

What finally got Arpaio fired

Just in case you still retained some semblance of faith in the criminal justice system, none of these offenses were enough to garner an arrest for Arpaio. Instead, his temporary downfall has more to do with persistent discriminatory bias. In fact, Maricopa County deputies were nine times more likely to stop a Latino person than a white one, according to a Justice Department report Oliver cite.

However, a court ruling said that deputies could not stop someone simply because of their apparent ethnicity or race. Arpaio did not comply and was found guilty of criminal contempt.

“At this point, he was a criminal,” said Oliver. Yet, practically immediately, Trump began to hint that he would pardon Arpaio for “just doing his job”.

That phrase didn’t sit well with Oliver. “You wouldn’t say that John Wayne Gacy was just doing his job,” he claimed. “It was the stuff on top of that that needed addressing”.

All of this could spell out some serious messages to both Latino people and law enforcement throughout the United States. Latinos, it seems, will be more subject to unlawful stops and questioning, all on the basis of their appearance. Furthermore, said Oliver, “law enforcement won’t necessarily be expected to do their jobs the way the Constitution or the courts say they should”.

Next: John Oliver on the problem with nuclear waste

The fact that a sitting president of the United States saw all of this — from stupid things like pink underwear to horrifying offenses like wrongful deaths and languishing sexual assault cases  — and somehow thought that Arpaio deserved clemency says much about our current political state.

Doesn’t it?