The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington has received $10 million from Seattle philanthropist Floyd Jones to establish a research fund that will promote alternatives to incarceration as a way to address social ills, the Seattle Times reports.

The Floyd and Delores Jones Transformational Fund will support the organization's efforts to use litigation, legislative advocacy, and education to advance alternatives to the funneling of excessive numbers of children and young people, people of color, the poor, and those with mental health issues into courts, jails, and prisons for petty offenses. The work will include ongoing efforts, in cooperation with law enforcement, to reform and develop alternatives to existing drug policies that focus on treatment rather than incarceration. The largest-ever gift to the Washington chapter of the ACLU also will support the organization's efforts to stop abusive collection agencies and to sue residential screening agencies that prevent prospective tenants with criminal records from obtaining housing.

"We can reduce the excessive funneling of people into the criminal-justice system if we can show that not every social problem should be treated as crime," said Kathleen Taylor, the organization's executive director.

Jones, who grew up picking cotton with his sharecropper family in Missouri, was the first in his family to attend high school; he subsequently attended college on the G.I. Bill and eventually made his fortune as a stock broker in Seattle. He and his late wife, Delores Haglund Jones, who died in 2005, have given to various causes in addition to the ACLU, including the Virginia Mason Medical Center, the University of Washington, Union Gospel Mission, KCTS, and Planned Parenthood.

"The overwhelming number of people in incarceration are blacks and minorities," Jones told the Seattle Times. “It's a crisis, and we need to address it." Referring to the state's three-strikes law, which has sent hundreds of offenders to prison for life for offenses such as second-degree robbery, Jones said, "I don't like to see young men get their whole future blacked out."