(WP) - A Maryland couple is donating $15 million to the American Civil Liberties Union to expand a campaign to cut prison populations and promote private initiatives to rehabilitate and employ ex-convicts, the ACLU announced.

The grant from David Trone, co-founder of Bethesda, Md.-based Total Wine & More — and his wife, June — is among the largest in the ACLU’s history.

The Trones, both 60, join a growing cadre of wealthy businesspeople funding a coalition of liberal, conservative and libertarian groups pushing the Obama administration and Congress to unwind drug war-era sentencing laws. Those advocates argue that draconian punishments have gone too far and cost too much, incarcerating 2.2 million Americans, pouring $80 billion a year into prisons and jails, and hollowing out families — particularly in low-income and minority communities.

Trone, of Potomac, Md., cited Total Wine’s support of the “ban the box”movement — removing the criminal-record check box from job applications — as a factor in his gift and an example of what private-sector partners can accomplish.

“Yes, people make mistakes,” he said. “But if they paid the price and now want to build a better life, why should that mistake have to carry with them the rest of their lives?”

The Trones’ grant comes one year after George Soros’s Open Society Foundations pledged $50 million over eight years to the ACLU’s political arm to elevate sentencing and other criminal justice policy changes in local, state and national elections.

Unlike Soros’s grant , the Trone family gift will pay for traditional ACLU litigation and educational activities and is tax deductible.

The six-year bequest will fund a Trone Center for Criminal Justice and boost state-level projects — including in the District, Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Indiana — where incarceration rates and the prospect of bipartisan cooperation are greatest, ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero said.

Romero said that despite the focus on a gridlocked Congress, momentum for change is growing among state and local governments, which house more than 90 percent of the nation’s prisoners and spend more than 90 percent of incarceration-related tax dollars.

He likened the momentum to the push for gay marriage equality, where business leaders who threatened to leave hostile states added an economic argument to the moral and legal case for anti-discrimination laws.

“If business leaders take a big stake in pushing these reforms, it ensures the sustainability of long-lasting reform,” Romero said. “If you can tie the power of the private sector to this sled, then Congress and the president will be dragged into taking real action.”