Letter From A Birmingham Jail By Martin Luther King

Chattel slavery allowed for the white people to perceive slaves as property. However, once abolished we, the people, continue to believe that slavery is no more. However, we are wrong slavery occurs in prison. This prison industrial complex has allowed for slavery to continue. When society forces the individual to commit these crimes, and as a result the legal system deems legal bondage as punishment. Martin Luther King Jr's essay, "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," argues that certain laws deemed just are unjust upon implementation because of how it comes degrading toward the human spirit and need to be opposed. Similarly, Michelle Alexander's excerpt, "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness," details how prison has

Just as history has seen with communities of color are essentially discriminated based on the color of their skin or way of living. King speaks of how through discrimination it gave rise to the Nation of Islam because, the "movement [was] nourished by the contemporary frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination" ("Jail"). This coincides with how advocates trying to stop the injustice former convicts receive after being released because one should be able to be given an opportunity without having to worry about their past determining the new chapter they are trying to pursue. Illustrating how the prison system has allowed for ex-convicts to have to be the new face of discrimination and make it harder to integrate back into society. Thus, contradicting the initial purpose of prison being a rehabilitation center, but now has become a dehumanizing center for convicted criminals. This reiterates how these actions of discrimination will one day be confronted by the former inmates that have been victims of this

With prisoners released from this power structure there is this struggle to reconnect with society after being denied basic rights and privacy while in this facility. Alexander expresses how former inmates "never truly reenter the society they inhabited prior to their conviction" (Alexander 261). With this confession this allows for one to understand that former convicts do struggle to reincorporate themselves into society because they are no longer seen as trustworthy and honest people, but rather someone that has been locked in a cage as a consequence for their actions. This just truly illustrates how the prison industrial complex affects whether society is willing to accept convicts back into white society. Knowing this as a consequence of the prison industrial complex demonstrates injustice because of how prison affects the lives of