SCLC at Half-Century

Jenny Jarvie,"King's Civil Rights group ‘Here to Stay'," LA Times, 6 August. At its 50th anniversary, Martin Luther King's SCLC may have found financial stability for the first time since his death in 1968. Jarvie asks:"To what end?" Conflict resolution centers in Israel and Italy? Glenn C. Loury's"Why are so many Americans in Prison?" Boston Review, July/August, points to one issue SCLC might tackle.

the United States—with five percent of the world's population—houses 25 percent of the world's inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.

Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America's urban and rural landscapes.

But tackling that issue might not keep SCLC's corporate sponsors happy with its mission.