That there are 2 million people in the jails of America – half of them black – is proof of dystopian justice. That there are seven times as many people – per capita – in American jails as in European jails is proof of dystopian justice. That there are seven times as many people – per capita – in American jails as in American jails of 1970 is proof of dystopian justice. That there is punishment at all is proof of dystopian justice.

Utopian justice is defined as restitution, the resolution of confusions, and the proportionate prophylaxis of people that repeatedly cause others loss, harm or injury. 

Dystopian justice is plausibly defined as adherence to the law of the oligarchy and associated vested interests with protracted and expensive legal proceedings followed by the painful punishment of incarceration as the warped teaching tool of a state with no recourse to intelligent or civilized methods of achieving forced compliance with good and bad laws.

More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity. 

– Dr. King