A campaign saying ‘NO MORE’ to a violent and corrupt prison system in Alabama

More than 1,500 people have died in Alabama’s prisons since the Justice Department declared the system unconstitutional in 2019. Homicides are more than seven times the national prison average; overdoses inside run at 13 times the statewide rate. Meanwhile, the state budgeted more than a billion dollars on a single new mega prison, even though prisons already consume nearly a quarter of the general fund—more than Alabama spends on public health and mental health combined.

None of this is in dispute. It is the documented condition of a system the state has understood for years and declined to fix.

Last fall, the documentary The Alabama Solution brought that condition to a national audience. We spent the year that followed on the less cinematic work behind the film: converting attention into pressure that could outlast a news cycle and reach people with the power to act. That is the work worth examining, because the field talks endlessly about raising awareness and almost never about the narrative infrastructure required to empower voices with hope and dignity in order to reach audiences for action. We treated the film as a beginning, not an achievement.

Alongside the moral case, we pressed the fiscal one, which is just as true and reaches different people.

The work also did not begin with the film. The people closest to the violence had been setting the table for this moment for decades. Organizers, many of them people who were incarcerated or formerly incarcerated, spent years documenting abuses, organizing collective action, and risking retaliation to make conditions visible. Their families, local advocates, and community members kept up the work when national attention was absent, and local, state, and regional journalists brought that work to the public’s attention.

The film and the campaign created new opportunities to amplify existing organizing, advocacy, and coverage, bringing renewed energy and pressure to bear on decision-makers, and answering the question: What does it take to turn public attention into political pressure?

A campaign around a single, adaptive phrase

Our impact campaign strategy started with a hard truth about Alabama: A campaign that sounds like a coastal lecture will die in a red state, no matter how righteous it feels from the outside. So we made an argument that could cross the aisle. Alongside the moral case, we pressed the fiscal one, which is just as true and reaches an audience that the moral case never will.

Even before construction delays and various other challenges, each bed in the new mega prison was projected to cost more than $300,000, more than the average Alabama home. Since 2020, the state has spent more than $68 million on litigation related to defense and settlements involving state prisons, including cases of alleged abuse and unconstitutional conditions—money that could have funded thousands of addiction-treatment placements. More than $450 million a year is extracted in labor from incarcerated workers paid little or nothing at all.

Framed that way, the crisis is plainly waste, secrecy, and public money spent to defend failure. That framing is why faith leaders, grieving families, conservative legislators, and criminal-justice reformers all signed the same open letter. Each of them had a reason of their own.

Part of what made that possible was the name itself. We built the campaign around a single phrase—NO MORE—precisely because it could bend without breaking. The slogan works as a container, capacious enough to hold a different demand for every audience across the political spectrum, yet disciplined enough that those demands never contradict one another. In Alabama, the phrase speaks plainly and across the aisle—no more secrecy, no more corruption, no more wasted taxpayer funds—language that reads as common sense rather than ideology, so that no one has to concede anything to agree with it.

Nationally, the same two words translate into no more deaths, no more violence, no more cover-ups—channeling outrage without fracturing the message. One phrase, credible in Alabama and resonant well beyond it, gave a sprawling coalition something it could say all at once.

Public outcry, sustained demands

This potential for cross-party agreement was notable in the Alabama State Legislature, as Republican state Sen. Larry Stutts argued in Yellowhammer News for independent prison oversight as an obligation of faith, sound governance, and public accountability. His proposal drew support from lawmakers in both parties, demonstrating that transparency and the basic safety of people in state custody can unite constituencies that disagree on much else.

A coalition, though, needs somewhere to push, and attention with nothing behind it simply evaporates.

We built the machinery first. That includes an open letter that has now gathered more than 3,000 signatures. It also included tools that let more than 8,000 people write directly to the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) and to their own legislators. Finally we created billboards along Montgomery’s highways, a four-page letter in The Montgomery Advertiser, more than 60 community screenings of the film, and a curriculum for people who wanted to understand the prison system rather than merely recoil from it.

The honest account is the more useful one.

The reach was real—more than 27 million video views, 1.6 million+ engagements, 400+ press mentions, with more than 150 in Alabama alone—but reach was never the point. What mattered was where we aimed it: at named officials and specific demands.

The pressure produced movement. A joint legislative committee on prisons met for the first time since the film’s release. A state lawmaker demanded an officer’s firing in a public hearing after the documentary surfaced the case of a beating death. Incarcerated people and their families sued prison officials. A petition called for a federal investigation into a death in custody. Though a prison system does not suddenly become constitutional because a committee convened or a billboard went up, public outcry and sustained demands meant these issues were increasingly elevated and on the record in rooms where officials have to answer for them.

Now, the Department of Justice is seeking a summary judgment against the State of Alabama and ADOC in its six-year lawsuit over the extreme abuse and neglectful treatment of incarcerated people. This filing advances the possibility of the strongest rebuke of the prison system in Alabama’s history. Overwhelming evidence and community testimonials, spurred by public outcry, serve as the basis for the 260-page motion.

The South as a warning

The distinction of empowered community voices, too long denied and unheard, entering the forefront of public discourse is the honest center of this work, and it is where the field most often deceives itself. Communications cannot reform a prison. Language cannot pass a bill or bring anyone back.

What it can do is change what the public sees, what officials must respond to, and it can help to create a sense of solidarity and voice among grieving families when they walk into a legislator’s office. We resisted every temptation to inflate that into something grander, because a campaign that claims credit it hasn’t earned forfeits the trust that made it work, and teaches funders to expect fiction. The honest account is the more useful one.

There is a reason this fight is unfolding in Alabama, and a reason it should matter to people who may never set foot in the state. The South draws a fraction of the philanthropic investment the rest of the country receives, so its emergencies are documented late and funded thinly, if at all.

What a state can do inside its prisons when almost no one is watching is a preview the rest of the country would be wise to study. Contrary to much of the public discourse about it, the South is not 50 years behind the nation; when it comes to sustained challenges against the fight for a fairer, more just nation, it is 50 years ahead. We are just beginning to see precisely how much the rest of the country has been shaped by Southern socio-political laboratories for policy change. When it comes to the question of whether institutions can be made to answer for themselves and be accountable for public waste and public harms, the South is, unfortunately, a warning for us all.

For philanthropy, the lesson is to invest in the organizing, research, legal support, and communications capacity that must exist before national attention arrives and remain after it disappears. For Alabama officials, the test is more immediate: independent prison oversight, protection for whistleblowers, consequences for documented abuse, and meaningful changes to the state’s spending priorities. For those working in communications, the obligation is to make these demands visible without mistaking visibility for their achievement. The people most affected must have a meaningful role in determining what accountability looks like.

The campaign goes on, because the conditions that made it necessary have not meaningfully changed. What has changed is that those conditions are now harder to hide, harder to defend, and harder to ignore. That, in the end, is what a public advocacy and film impact campaign is meant to accomplish.

About the campaign: NO MORE: The Campaign for Safety and Accountability in Alabama Prisons, is a coalition of state and national organizations working alongside incarcerated people, families, and advocates to demand safety, transparency, and accountability in Alabama’s prisons. Launched in October 2025, the campaign combines public education, research, grassroots organizing, and advocacy to expose systemic abuses, mobilize public pressure, and demand meaningful institutional reform.