Dr. King's Legacy: Confronting Mass Incarceration and Racial Injustice Today
Sitting in Birmingham jail for leading peaceful protests against bans on “race mixing,” Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. penned a letter that would become one of his most well-known calls for the nation’s grave need to combat injustice. On the January holiday that commemorates him six decades later, his words ring truer than ever in the face of mass incarceration in the U.S.
The United States leads the world in incarceration rates, with nearly 2.2 million individuals in prison and an annual influx of 10.6 million jail admissions.The mass incarceration crisis is also a racial one–Black Americans make up 40% of the incarcerated population, despite representing only 13% of US residents.
Like the racial injustices Dr. King was protesting at his time, combatting the mass incarceration crisis demands the power of collective action. It also demands that this action be directed towards promoting solutions leading to sustained, material change for incarcerated folk.
“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar,” spoke Dr. King in his “Beyond Vietnam” speech at Riverside Church. “It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
That’s why FreeCap Financial is proud to center anti-racism and people power in our work. Our research reveals companies’ ties to prison labor and hiring practices when it comes to formerly incarcerated folk, equipping investors to make justice-informed investment decisions. In fact, we’ve just released our latest Criminal Justice Report, uncovering the prison labor practices of key industry players and quantifying companies’ financial relationships with prisons with our new Prison Vending Relationship dataset.
On this MLK Day, we at FreeCap are remembering the words Dr. King wrote from behind bars: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” We hope you will too.
We invite you to join us in the fight to divest from prison labor and invest in freedom. Check out our data subscription offering or contact us to learn more.
