Injustice Anywhere: MLK and Criminal Justice

Today we mark the 81st birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., and pause to consider a nation and world that has made great progress toward racial, economic and social justice in eight decades. But we still have a long way to go, and nowhere is that more evident than in our criminal justice policy.

More than one in 100 Americans will spend tonight behind bars, and the vast majority of them are poor. The country is 75% white, but our prisons are 59% black or Latino. Fifty-five years after a young Martin Luther King, Jr., led the Montgomery bus boycott, something is still very, very wrong with social and racial justice in our country.

In his famous Birmingham Jail letter of April 16, 1963, King wrote perhaps his second most-quoted line: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." These words, written behind bars, continue to inspire activists today in the fight for justice in our courts, our police stations and our jails.

In a great post today on the Social Entrepreneurship blog, Nathaniel Whittemore examines King's final speech as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967. Whittemore writes:

(King) believed that when you give people the foundations to be successful, they usually are, and that when you give people the chance to be good -- to themselves and to others -- they usually will be. This is what he meant when he said that "the arc of the moral universe..bends towards justice." The quote is not about destiny, but about agency.

The state of our moral universe is, like every single other moment in the history of human existence, to be determined. It is, like every other moment, up to us to bend the arc.

In the year ahead, let's offer our fellow citizens a second chance instead of a prison jumpsuit. Let's fix our system to stop it from sending the innocent to prison, and to stop oversentencing the poor for minor infractions. A system built on punishment is not one that bends toward justice. This year, in remembering the struggles and leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., let's bend the arc of our criminal justice system toward compassion, toward fairness and toward true justice.

Photo Credit: Walter Albertin