The basketball players at Morehouse, the Maroon Tigers, recently played a friendly game of hoops with the incarcerated athletes inside FCI-ATL. 

The culmination of the semester at Burruss Correctional Training Center (CTC) was a series of one act plays collectively entitled “ZIP! ZAP! ZOOM!.” The event was held on the evening of December 20, 2024. In partnership with Common Good Atlanta, faculty from Morehouse have been teaching humanities classes at Burruss CTC since 2020. (The Higher Education in Prisons Program in the Andrew Young Center at Morehouse College also teaches at Metro Reentry Facility and the Federal Correctional Institution—formerly the US Federal Penitentiary—in Atlanta.) 

The United States has 4% of world’s population but 20% of the world’s incarcerated population. Georgia has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world: whereas the national rate is 664 per 100,000, Georgia incarcerates 881. (By way of comparison, France locks up 93 per 100,000.) 

Dr. King’s prolific legacy of social justice leadership is more relevant and important today than ever. No other quote from better articulates the spirit of what has been missing from the fight against the mass disenfranchisement of the incarcerated community. My mind works along similar lines. Those citizens who are in jails and prisons across the city of Atlanta, most of whom will return to society one day, have been left to figure it out on their own. The prison label has permanently branded them, and we as the “outsiders” don’t share that brand, although we come from the same communities and have made many of the same mistakes. Like cemeteries, those incarcerated are buried beneath us: hidden out of sight, and after a while, seamlessly forgotten about.