ALC emerged from the Human Rights Coalition, a volunteer-based abolitionist group started by incarcerated people in long term solitary confinement in Pennsylvania, including current ALC executive director, Robert Saleem Holbrook.

Two activist attorneys, including current ALC legal director Bret Grote, founded ALC in 2013. Their first client was former political prisoner Russell Maroon Shoatz.

Since then, ALC has used innovative and groundbreaking legal strategies to sue police departments, jails, prisons, and the PA Department of Corrections to address police brutality, excessive sentencing, conditions of confinement including the use of restraint chairs and solitary confinement, Americans with Disabilities Act violations, medical neglect of incarcerated people, toxic and dangerous environmental conditions in prisons and jails, and more.

We’ve developed particular expertise at attacking solitary confinement and other extreme control measures; excessive and long-term sentencing including Death by Incarceration (life without the possibility of parole); and jails’ and prisons’ failure to protect the mental and physical health of those whom they cage.

Today, our advocacy impacts as many as 60,000 people a year.

ALC fights to:

• free people from incarceration
• protect the rights and wellbeing of those who encounter the criminal punishment system at all points along its pipeline
• extract financial resources (via legal settlements) from carceral institutions like police departments, jails, and prisons, and redistribute those funds to people impacted by the criminal punishment system
• build power among, take our leadership from, and be accountable to people who are directly impacted by capitalism, state violence, and mass incarceration
• and completely dismantle these racist, classist systems and in their place create and/or support the building of alternative models of addressing harm and creating wellness in our communities

We employ a multitude of strategies aimed at the many points on the criminal punishment system conveyor belt:

• class action, impact, and accompaniment litigation
• community organizing and grassroots base building
• data collection, analysis, and reporting
• courtwatching
• mutual aid/community-based participatory defense and advocacy
• policy advocacy and legislative lobbying
• organizational alliance building
• strategic communications

Along with the uniquely broad scope of our work, we have many distinctions from other groups working in the criminal punishment reform/abolition space, including:

• the lived experiences of our staff and Board members, groups which include many people who were formerly incarcerated or who’ve been directly impacted by the criminal punishment system in other ways
• our long-standing, personal relationships with people inside (prisons)
• our deep roots in the communities most impacted by state violence
• the depth of our organizing experience
• the volume and quality of our research, reporting, and other communications
• our grounding in movements for liberation
• and our commitment to bringing a political analysis to all aspects of our project.

Through years of work on our issues, we’ve developed authentic connections and credibility with a vast network of impacted people, grassroots volunteers, allied organizations, funders, policy makers, elected officials, journalists, and others, whom we can mobilize for different opportunities.

ALC is looked to as a source of expertise, advice, and support for other movement groups around issues related to policing and mass incarceration, and as policy and issue experts by the media.

Broadly speaking, our work benefits all residents of Pennsylvania in that it enhances public safety, wellness, and equity, and creates a more just and healthy society.

But on a more immediate level, our work largely benefits vulnerable populations (people who are poor, Black and Brown, queer or trans, disabled, or mentally ill) who are disproportionately targeted and harmed by policing, the criminal court system, and mass incarceration.

Our work results in fewer and less discriminatory arrests and less police violence; fewer people becoming incarcerated; shorter stays for those who do end up behind bars; and safer and more humane conditions for people while they are incarcerated.

In the long term, our vision and goal is total abolition of the current policing and carceral system and the establishment instead of community-driven, equitable, and holistic transformative justice systems.

In the short term, we seek to:

• decarcerate (reduce the number of people in) existing jails and prisons and discourage the building of new ones.
• connect criminal justice reform, mass incarceration, and decarceration to social issues such as poverty, absence of living wages for working class people, childcare, health insurance, inadequate and poorly funded schools, and mass unemployment amongst youth.
• expand the right to vote to incarcerated people and increase the political representation of marginalized communities in elected positions across the state by advocating for justice-impacted candidates. 
• build political power in Philadelphia’s Black and Brown working class neighborhoods that is not connected to the city’s patronage system which has contributed to Philadelphia having one of the lowest voter turn rates in the country despite having a Black population of over 40%
• prevent a return to mandatory minimums and the policies that birthed mass incarceration
• defund and defang the police.
• shift harm reduction and harm response away from the current criminal punishment systems, to systems designed and controlled by communities who experience the most harm and inequity.
• divert people (especially those with mental health and substance use disorders) from the criminal courts, jails, and prisons into other systems that can better address the needs and challenges facing those populations.
• enforce constitutionally mandated protections for those who do experience incarceration.
• extract resources from carceral institutions to the point that they become unsustainable, and redirect those resources to marginalized communities who’ve been most harmed.