Los Angeles Police Department officers push back protesters in July 2020. Photo by Michael Muthee/Unsplash
If you’re from inner-city Birmingham, Alabama, there’s a “99-percent chance” you have a family member or friend who has been incarcerated, according to Veronica Johnson, deputy director for the Alabama Justice Initiative, which has been fighting against a proposal to build three new prisons in the state. She has an uncle serving a 60-year prison sentence.
“I’m a regular person,” she told The Appeal. “There’s nothing special about me.”
In the fall of 2020, Johnson, who is Black, traveled to rural Brierfield, Alabama—“deep into Trump country,” she said—to talk to residents about a new prison the state was planning to put in their community. It was a Sunday, and Johnson, who was wearing a headwrap with locks hanging out of the front, recalled wondering, “Do I look too ethnic?” As she went from door to door, the people she spoke to largely agreed that their community didn’t have the infrastructure to handle a 3,100-bed prison.
“Those people stood by our side—we crossed political lines,” Johnson said proudly. It was the “ultimate satisfaction.”
That campaign jump-started Communities Not Prisons, a coalition of grassroots activists, faith leaders, farmers, and national organizations, which eventually halted the proposed prison. The activists believed they had won the fight, but then COVID-19 hit, bringing a flood of federal relief money to Alabama—and, with it, renewed talk of prison expansion. Continue reading →
