When Carla Crowder walked into a Jefferson County courtroom in August 2019, she didn\u2019t expect to change the direction of her small nonprofit, the Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice. She was there for one man: 58-year-old Alvin Kennard, who had spent 36 years behind bars for stealing $50.75 from a bakery in 1983 at age 22. His three earlier felonies \u2014 burglaries he committed at age 18 \u2014 meant he was sentenced under Alabama\u2019s notoriously harsh \u201cthree-strikes\u201d law, which mandates life without parole even for a low-level offense in which no one is physically harmed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Crowder\u2019s group hadn\u2019t taken on individual clients before. The tiny policy and advocacy shop she had joined just months earlier was built to study and reform the state\u2019s criminal-justice system, often through data-driven reports. But when a judge asked her to represent Kennard, she agreed \u2014 and when he was released, the story ricocheted<\/a> nationally<\/a>. That moment reshaped the organization\u2019s sense of what was possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a state dominated by a Republican supermajority and long resistant to criminal-justice reform, Alabama Appleseed has become one of the South\u2019s most unexpectedly effective advocacy groups. While expanding its programs, it has kept its focus narrow, zeroing in on freeing older inmates who received harsh sentences for nonviolent crimes committed decades earlier. After Kennard’s story received so much attention, the group realized it could use his and other personal stories to help engage lawmakers and supporters. That humanized its valuable data.<\/strong> And it learned to build coalitions in unlikely places, persuading conservative lawmakers, faith leaders, and national funders that a small, locally rooted organization could have outsize impact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those choices transformed the group from a four-person research shop barely scraping by into a 10-person, $1.4 million organization supported by national grant makers like the NFL. Part of the broader Appleseed Network, a group of 20 justice centers across the United States and Mexico, Alabama Appleseed was among the first to directly represent incarcerated people. It also runs re-entry services, has won bipartisan policy changes, and has come within a few votes of passing sweeping sentencing reform \u2014 an approach designed to improve individual lives while also offering a model for how small nonprofits can influence large public systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAlabama Appleseed is doing hard work in a hard system in a state where not everyone is pumped up about rehabilitation,\u201d says Rachel Estes, director of outreach at Canterbury United Methodist Church, which partners with Appleseed clients through its Books to Prisons program. \u201cThis is an organization where the left meets the right,\u201d she said. \u201cIn a state where it’s just not top of mind, they\u2019ve done an excellent job of educating people, of advocating for people, and helping be a liaison of this really weird thing called incarceration and prison.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n