Summary Of Letter From Birmingham Jail

In “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. states: “any law that degrades human personality is unjust” and that it is therefore our moral obligation to resist unjust legal systems. Unjust laws have been around since the beginning of our country, and we still have not been able to solve this basic conundrum; it can still be seen in contemporary issues that are occurring to this day such as Colin Kaepernick sitting during the national anthem. King’s arguments can be applied to most, but not all, aspects of the U.S. prison system because just laws are also present in the system. Current U.S. prisons are built on fundamentally degrading laws including the increase in punishment if one desires to go to court and people of color receiving

By analyzing Martin Luther King’s essay and Davis’s excerpt, it becomes evident that the current status quo of mass incarceration, racial inequality, and injustice in the U.S. prison system demonstrates the severity of its institutional corruption.
Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” provides many assertions of racial inequality which can be applicable to the current U.S. prison system. An example of his assertions is, “My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without legal and nonviolent pressure. History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily” (“Letter”). This text supports the fact that the racial inequality aspect in King’s argument is apparent in the current U.S. prison systems by focusing on the imprisonment of minorities with harsher punishments compared to whites that have committed the same crime. In addition, the quote is significant because it exemplifies the fact that white Americans do not harbor any desire to give up their racial privilege. This, in turn, has led to the mass incarceration

provides support for the level of applicability King’s claims about justice and injustice have in regards to the current U.S. prison system. As an exemplar, Davis writes, “In 1777, John Howard, the leading Protestant proponent of penal reform in England, published The State of the Prisons, in which he conceptualized imprisonment as an occasion for religious self-reflection and self-reform” (Davis 45-46). This illustrates Howard’s view on the purpose of imprisonment, one that has clearly not been incorporated into the current U.S. prison system. Howard’s perspective is significant because it displays the gradual metamorphosis of the purpose of imprisonment from self-reform to profit. The creation of private prisons for the sole purpose of profit is inhumane and the white Americans who contributed to its implementation should be imprisoned for life instead. How can someone see a human life as less valuable than paper money? The film 13th discusses this question through analysis of the prison-industrial complex. This was an institution which led to the increase of men incarcerated due to the underhanded politics of private prisons; mainly consisting of the prisons providing resources to the government in return for profit. This system is inherently unjust, and it is unbelievable that it is still in practice today. Also, “It ordered and classified social life, it represented individuals as conscious of