In the spring of 1997, my future brother-in-law and I drove through Detroit’s east side, with 8Ball & MJG booming from the sound system. En route to his mother’s house, we passed blighted blocks, laced with vacant houses and abandoned buildings, some so hollowed out that brush and trees had reclaimed them.

 I had just landed a job at the Detroit Free Press, where I worked for nearly 20 years, writing about, among other things, prisons, urban issues, and the criminal justice system. Shannon had just gotten out of prison, after serving four years for a drug offense.

We were feeling good, kicking it. Shannon talked about growing up here: Getting shot at 15 and selling drugs to help feed his family. What I remember most, though, is him telling me that, among his peers who grew up with him in the 1980s, all of them had gone to prison.

By the 1990s, prison had become something truly insidious for many young black men in poor urban neighborhoods: an unspoken expectation. Federal statistics showed one in three black males were expected to go to prison in their lifetime, compared to one in 17 white males.

This would have astounded Martin Luther King, Jr., who was assassinated 50 years ago, on April 4, 1968, while in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers.

King fought inequality, racism, segregation, and in later years poverty and the Vietnam War. The civil rights movement he led secured many legal rights, vastly improving conditions for most black Americans.

Mass incarceration had not yet reared its ugly head in the 1960s. Today, it is the nation’s most troubling social, economic, and human rights problem. In Texas and around the country, African Americans are imprisoned at rates five times higher than are whites. More black men are under correctional control – in prison, jail, or on probation or parole – than were enslaved in 1850.

In 1968, the year of King’s death, the nation’s prison population was 188,000. By 2010, it had increased nearly nine times, to more than 1.6 million. Including county jails and local lockups, roughly 2.3 million Americans are behind bars – nearly 40 percent of them black Americans.

An $85-billion-a-year industry, correction systems are a major employer and lobbyist. The U.S. has become the world’s leading incarcerator. With less than 5 percent of the planet’s population, it holds 22 percent of the prisoners.

Texas is a big contributor, with more than 140,000 inmates. The Lone Star State has the nation’s largest prison system, as well as one of the highest incarceration rates. Despite recent reforms, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice still runs one of the worst prison systems in the country. A 2015 Newsweek article called the state “the prison rape capital of the United States.”

Crime rates, which have remained relatively stable in the last 50 years, did not create the incarceration nation. Public policy changes did that, including three-strikes’ laws and harsh drug sentencing that disproportionately affected black Americans. Among the most notorious: the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine.

Studies show black Americans do not use illicit drugs more than whites do. Still, they are arrested for drug use at far higher rates.

The effects of mass incarceration go far beyond prison walls. They have severed social networks and left one in nine black children with a parent in prison, making them six times more likely to go to prison as adults. Incarceration also creates lifelong employment barriers for the 95 percent of prisoners – nearly 700,000 people a year – who go home.

Politically, felony convictions prevent an estimated 5.8 million Americans, including one in every 13 black Americans, from voting. In Florida, a battleground state, nearly one in five African Americans are ineligible to vote.

As a reporter, editorial writer, and columnist, I’ve visited nearly 50 prisons and talked with hundreds of men, and women, who were either in prison, coming out of prison, or on their way. I’ve witnessed a cancer that robs the nation of not only scarce resources but something far more precious: the priceless potential of talented people to contribute to their communities and country.

Whenever I’m invited by prisoners to speak, often at ceremonies honoring King or Malcolm X, I often assert that if King were alive today, he would be here, in a prison, taking on what has been called America’s new Jim Crow.

I could easily add: “And he would weep at what he saw.”

Jeff Garritt is the editor of the Palestine, Texas, Herald-Press. Contact him at jgerritt@palestineherald.com.