Back in April, ASBC and SVC joined a national group of investors and business leaders standing with local calls from the Communities Not Prisons Coalition to stop the bond financing of new prisons in Alabama with the private prison company, CoreCivic.  

In an unprecedented move, this diverse group of allies won!  By organizing enough investors to refuse to finance the bond on both the public and private market, we were able to pressure the financing institutions to pull out of the deal!  Now the state of Alabama has passed a bill to use $400M of COVID relief dollars to build new prisons — 22% of their COVID relief funds overall.  A gross misuse of funds. 

This would make it the largest investment the Federal Government has put into prison growth in Alabama since the 1994 Crime Bill!

AND this is precedent setting — the domino effect has already begun! FIVE municipalities are now proposing to follow suit and use ARP funds to build new jails from Iowa to Illinois to Maine... 

Join us and call on the Biden administration and Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen to say: NO state, including Alabama, should be permitted to use CARES Act, American Rescue Plan (ARP), infrastructure funds, or any other federal dollars for prison construction projects. Aid should be allocated to explicitly center and uplift widespread economic prosperity, with a specific focus on historically-excluded Black, Brown and Indigenous communities.