John Oliver on the juvenile justice system: ‘Makes no sense’

John Oliver opened the first Last Week Tonight since protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) erupted in Los Angeles, prompting Donald Trump to send in 4,000 national guard troops and 700 active-duty marines. The deployment “felt completely over the top, especially when you consider troops will apparently be there for 60 days at a cost to taxpayers of roughly $134m,” Oliver said on Sunday evening. “Usually when that much is spent on something completely pointless, we at least get to see one of the Avengers in it.”

Oliver also skewered Ice’s widespread armed raids across the city, arresting undocumented immigrants by the thousands. “When everyone was warning about a slippery slope to authoritarianism under Trump, this is it,” he said. “Because masked government agents grabbing people off the street and deporting them without due process is authoritarianism. Sending in the military to crack down on protests against those actions is authoritarianism.”

The “No Kings” protests offered a glimmer of hope, at least. “We’re living through a time in American history that will be remembered for acts of incredible cruelty, but I hope it will also be remembered for acts of courage and defiance,” Oliver said.

The host then pivoted to an extended main segment on the US juvenile justice system, which is somehow even worse and less regulated than its adult one. The system is busy – in 2022, the most recent year for data, juvenile courts heard more than 611,000 cases and incarcerated over 38,000 people. The US incarcerates youth at many times the rate of other nations, according to the Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty, “which is not a study you want to be on the leaderboard of”, Oliver joked. “It’s like having a urologist say, ‘single weirdest wand I’ve ever seen.’ That’s how ashamed we should be – it’s topping the weird dicks list level of shame.”

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The system also “tends to be worryingly opaque”, with juvenile court hearings often closed to the public. “Which does make sense, in a way – it’s important to protect kids’ privacy,” said Oliver. “But in practice, that created a dangerous lack of accountability for the adults in charge. Because the truth is, our juvenile justice system has many of the flaws of our adult one, except the people running it have even more power and the damage it can do is even longer lasting.”

As Oliver noted, kids are not tiny adults, but kids experiencing adolescence. “We’ve long understood that kids need a system that takes their still developing minds into account,” said Oliver. It’s part of the reason why a separate court process was created for them” in 1899. But in the current system, “at every stage, factors beyond a kid’s control can propel them to vastly different outcomes. And unfortunately, many kids have no idea how to navigate this system or even what their basic rights are,” with up to 90% waiving their Miranda rights.

“Every kid in court should at least have access to the stuff they have on Law & Order,” said Oliver. “Which as we all know is a lawyer, two quippy detectives, a guy only loosely connected to the case but played by a suspiciously high-profile guest star so you know that they did it, a dead body played by a Tisch graduate getting their big break and, as always, an abrupt smash cut to the name Dick Wolf.”

Juvenile court trials usually include no jury, with the kids’ future totally up to the discretion of the judge, who could send the case to adult court. That judge – subject to individual biases, particularly racial ones – has a slew of punishments at their disposal, ranging from probation (with great discrepancy in terms) to incarceration. Detention could be in a juvenile detention center while awaiting trial, or a longer-term facility after they have been sentenced that’s akin to a prison, even if they are not called as such. Twelve states have no minimum age for kids sent to these so-called “centers”, which can house kids as young as seven.

“Which is horrifying enough, even before you discover what it can be like inside one,” said Oliver. One mother in Michigan described a juvenile detention facility flooded with sewage. “These places are supposed to be rehabilitative,” Oliver said. “But basic services such as mental health counseling can be non-existent.” Researchers have found that detained students have significantly worse academic outcomes, with only 16% graduating from high school.

Worse, some centers routinely use solitary confinement, given the euphemisms “seclusion”, “isolation”, “segregation” or “room confinement”, and which is widely considered to be torture. One former teenage detainee in Tennessee described being put in solitary for four whole days. “That would absolutely be torture,” said Oliver. “You try shutting yourself in a closet for four days. You will quickly lose your mind. Sure, you’ll maybe initially check the back to see if you’ve got any chance of a Narnia situation, but even then you’re dealing with some needy talking animals and some pretty heavy-handed Christian allegory. You might be better off on your own.”

Shocking as some stories of abuse could be, Oliver noted that “nothing that I’ve brought up tonight is new information. We’ve known about abuse in juvenile confinement facilities for decades. And it’s worth remembering, if public safety is your priority, locking kids up by the hundreds of thousands just isn’t the answer to that.” Detention, Oliver added, actually increases the likelihood that a teenager will be arrested and punished again. “Locking kids up, over the long run, makes no fucking sense.”

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As for what can be done, “I would argue that the whole system I’ve shown you here from start to finish needs reform,” said Oliver. “When it comes to the juvenile justice process, kids should be provided access to legal counsel at every step of the system.” He recommended changes encouraged by experts, such as diverting kids into family-focused, multidimensional therapy, mentorship programs and community-based interventions.

“The good news is, there are lots of organizations that have been working hard to deliver those services,” he said. “The bad news is, they’re among the ones getting hardest hit by the Trump administration’s massive funding cuts.”

Oliver conceded that “there are some kids who may be a threat to themselves or others, and may for a time need to be in a secure setting. But even then, I’d argue any residential treatment they get should bear no resemblance to adult incarceration. I’d also argue that adult incarceration should bear no resemblance to adult incarceration, but that is for another time.

“Reform can’t be a discrete event. It has to be an ongoing commitment to reimagining this entire system,” Oliver concluded. “No matter what they did, kids deserve safety, respect, protection and the chance to grow beyond their mistakes.”