Pay or your son dies: Oklahoma inmates’ families extorted by inside gangs (2024)

Ruby TopalianOklahoma Watch

Cynthia and her husband spent an ordinary day in December 2022 driving to their retirement home, planning to clean it out after the holidays.

Then, her phone buzzed.

“Where is my f—-ing money your son caught out owing me,” the text read. “I’ll send word wherever he goes if you try and call (a prison official) and tell on me. I want the 250 I’m owed or I’ma have him hurt.”

Cynthia faced a dilemma: pay or risk her son getting assaulted, maybe killed. Her son was imprisoned at the Lawton Correctional and Rehabilitation Facility at the time.

The extortion threats started in 2017 when her son was booked into the Oklahoma County Detention Center. Cynthia suspects gangs are orchestrating the extortion.

The first time it happened, within the first week he arrived at the jail, Cynthia said she drove to Walgreens and spent more than $500 on reloadable debit cards. She texted the card details, thinking the payment would stop the threats. It didn’t.

She said her son, who is serving an 11-year sentence, suffers from mental health issues and drug addiction and is indebted to the gangs who sell to him. When Cynthia refuses to send money, interest is added and her son is assaulted. He told her he had been raped.

Less than a month after the first threat, she said another inmate sent her a photo of her address and threatened her life.

Cynthia, a 65-year-old mother of two who lives in Oklahoma City, estimated she has spent at least $40,000 on reloadable debit cards and $10,000 in digital payment services to respond to the threats.

Oklahoma Watch interviewed six people with almost identical extortion stories, their names have been changed or withheld to protect them and their incarcerated family members from retaliatory violence.

Many cases go unreported for fear of gang retaliation — according to more than a dozen Oklahoma correctional experts, prisoner advocates and district attorneys — which makes it difficult to pinpoint how many people are affected.

Former Oklahoma Department of Corrections Director Joe Allbaugh said extortion of family members by gangs from inside the prisons was widespread while he held the position from 2016 to 2019, though DOC does not track those cases. He conceded that he could not tackle the problem.

“It’s another one of these things that keeps me, personally, up at night,” Allbaugh said. “I failed.”

Investigators come up with few answers

Sylvia started receiving text messages from suspected gang members less than a month after her son was booked into the Lawton prison in April 2023. His age, only 21 when he arrived there, makes him vulnerable, she said.

The 39-year-old mother of three from Mississippi tried to ignore the calls from her son — approximately 20 per day — begging for money to pay the blackmailers.

In May 2023, she gave in and sent $180. She now sends at least $100 weekly.

“My cellphone rings, and when I see the name of the prison, I want to throw up,” Sylvia said. “I am a walking zombie; I am a shell of myself.”

Once, when she could not get a payment made on time, her son was stabbed.

Although she has sent more than $13,000 since last summer, Sylvia said if she is ever late on her payments, her son says inmates working as food runners in the cafeteria deprive him of meals. He is terrified to leave his cell because he is frequently attacked, even when escorted to the showers.

The issue isn’t limited to the Lawton prison, a sprawling 2,697-bed medium-to-maximum security facility that incarcerates some of the state’s most violent offenders. Those interviewed have been extorted by gangs at Mack Alford Correctional Center, Allen Gamble Correctional Center, Dick Conner Correctional Center and others.

Dorothy’s son was incarcerated at John Lilley Correctional Center, a minimum security prison in Boley, when the extortion began. In July 2022, a suspected gang member threatened to assault her son if he didn’t receive $1,000.

Like Cynthia, she rushed out to buy reloadable debit cards in response to the threat. A mother of four from New Mexico who works two jobs, Dorothy has since spent more than $8,000 through digital payment services to try to protect her son. She said his unwillingness to join a gang or partake in drugs makes him a target.

Dorothy ran out of money one day last year and could not send the money in time. That night, her son was stabbed.

Cynthia, Sylvia and Dorothy reported the extortion to law enforcement, from local sheriff’s offices to the Department of Corrections and the FBI. Finding those responsible, however, is not so easy.

After Cynthia filed a complaint, the Oklahoma Department of Corrections’ Office of the Inspector General opened an investigation.

Investigators confiscated four contraband phones, forensically examined them and interviewed several inmates across the prison system, who denied being involved. After two months, investigators were unable to determine who sent the messages.

Instead, they concluded that her son was partially behind the extortion; one investigator emailed Cynthia and asked if she wanted to press charges against him. The investigator said if she continued sending money, she could be in violation of several state statutes for knowing the money was going toward drugs.

Cynthia said she felt totally abandoned.

Cellphones make crime possible for prisoners

Contraband cellphones are the principal means through which inmates extort the family members of other inmates, Oklahoma Department of Corrections Inspector General Jacob Wheeler said.

In 2022, the Department of Corrections collected 5,247 of them across all of its prisons.

“There are all kinds of threats and coercion to people bringing them in,” said Chuck Sullivan, the district attorney of Pittsburg County, home to Oklahoma State Penitentiary. “Girlfriends on the outside are equipped to hide phones in body cavities and bring them in, and that’s what you see most often.”

Phones are also smuggled via duffel bags thrown over fences into the prison yard, flown in by drone, or correctional officers may be paid off or coerced to smuggle them in.

The Oklahoma Department of Corrections cannot use cellphone jammers, a technology that blocks all cell signals within the surrounding area, because they are banned by the Federal Communications Commission. The Commission deems jammers a threat to public safety because they shut off cell signals beyond where they are installed.

A cellphone detection wristband pilot program was launched by the Oklahoma Department of Corrections in 2020. The program failed after gang members threatened to assault anyone who wore the wristbands.

The other problem is staffing. Oklahoma has 45% fewer correctional officers now than it did six years ago, according to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections. The inmate population has only decreased 20% during that time.

With staffing problems so rampant, it is extremely difficult for correctional officers to monitor the flow of contraband, said Shad Hagan, a former case manager at Dick Conner Correctional Center.

According to Department of Corrections records, Dick Conner Correctional Center had 89 correctional officers on staff in 2017. As of July, it has 43. Dick Conner is at 99% capacity with 1,209 inmates.

Potential solution cost-prohibitive for prisons

The Federal Communications Commission legalized a potential alternative to jammers in 2021: Contraband Interdiction Systems. The systems identify and disable illegal phones but do not disrupt the cell signals of phones outside the prison.

Two Oklahoma prisons, the Dick Conner Correctional Center and Oklahoma State Penitentiary, have received authorization from the Federal Communications Commission to install them.

But the technology is expensive. One contraband interdiction system can cost $3 million to $4 million, said Todd Craig, the former chief of security at the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

The Oklahoma Department of Corrections invested in less expensive technology at North Fork and Mack Alford prisons in 2020 with a $420,216 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Assistance. They purchased SIM card detectors and a small-scale contraband interdiction system that does not require Federal Communications Commission authorization, U.S. Department of Justice reports show.

Those systems fall short in some areas. SIM cards are being phased out in newer cellphones. Craig, an expert in contraband interdiction systems, said he is not aware of any data proving SIM card detectors reduce the number of phones that enter prisons. The small contraband interdiction system installed by the department is portable, so its ability to monitor the flow of contraband is limited.

The Oklahoma Department of Corrections is confiscating fewer phones annually at the facilities using that technology.

North Fork Correctional Center confiscated 659 phones in 2021 and 481 in 2022, a 22% decline. Mack Alford Correctional Center saw a similar trend with 664 in 2021 and 592 in 2022, an 11% decrease.

Craig said the multimillion-dollar interdiction systems are the most effective technology, but states have been slow to adopt them due to their high price.

South Carolina bucked the trend in August, allocating $11 million to start a cellphone interdiction system at several state prisons. The funding came after years of negotiations between the director of South Carolina’s Department of Corrections and federal and state lawmakers.

“It takes commitment from the director and his staff working with all these external stakeholders to get the job done,” Craig said.

Advancements in technology may offer hope, but for Cynthia the damage has already been done.

This year, she reached a breaking point. She ran out of money. In February, she sold her retirement home and has been balancing her family’s medical bills, all while being extorted from a prison some 90 miles away.

When she called her son through the prison phones, inmates screamed demands for money in the background. Cynthia stopped calling.

She hasn’t hugged her son in seven years and is now too afraid to even speak with him; her son is still accruing debt but she cannot give anymore, knowing that her son will likely be harmed as a result. She now spends every day petrified that he will not make it out alive.

If he does, she fears the mental and physical abuse he has endured will change him into someone she no longer recognizes.

“His humanity is not gone,” she said. “But if he’s in there much longer, it will be.”