Appearing Tuesday night on The Daily Show, filmmaker Eugene Jarecki explained how the “failed” war on drugs was fueled by corporate-interests.

“It has to do with business,” he told Jon Stewart. “This country is finding, everywhere we look, we are seeing places where the extraordinary power of corporations in this country, and the unholy alliance they have with those in Congress, is destroying everything… There are private prisons all over this country that rely for their own survival on the incarceration of our fellow human beings.”

ADVERTISEMENT

But Jarecki said even public detention facilities were part of the commercialization of prisons. “I went to prison-industrial trade shows where I saw people who literally make their entire life’s work out of selling you the better stun gun,” he explained.

Jarecki’s latest documentary, The House I Live In, explores America’s war on drugs and the resulting mass incarceration. The United States imprisons more of its citizens than any country in the world, he noted.

“This has been such a disaster,” he said. “Forty-years, a trillion dollars spent, 45 million arrests, and yet drugs are cheaper, purer, more available today than ever before.”

Watch video, courtesy of Comedy Central, below: