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*#@ king 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 Green Dot reloadable debit cards. She texted the card details thinking it would stop the threats. It didn’t.
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 that he was raped.
That same month, another inmate sent her a photo of her address listed online, threatening to kill her.
Cynthia, a 65-yearold mother of two who lives in Oklahoma City, estimated she has spent more than $50,000 on Green Dot cards and Cash App payments since 2017, at least $40,000 with the cards and $10,000 with Cash App. The extorters instructed her to describe the payments as something innocuous, such as coffee or art supplies, so it doesn’t raise red flags.
Oklahoma Watch interviewed six people with almost identical extortion stories. The names of those included in this article were changed or withheld to protect them and their incarcerated family members from likely retaliatory violence.
Many cases go unreported for fear of gang retaliation, more than a dozen Oklahoma correctional experts, prisoner advocates and district attorneys said, making it difficult to pinpoint how many people are affected. The Department of Corrections does not track the number of extortion cases.
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. 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.”
A walking zombie
When the extortion began, Sylvia’s son was also incarcerated at the Lawton prison.
Though she lives thousands of miles away from Oklahoma, she started receiving text messages from suspected gang members less than a month after her son was booked into the prison in April 2023.
At only 21 when he arrived at Lawton, Sylvia said his age makes him vulnerable.
Sylvia, a 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, however, a violent storm hit her home city. As the wind and rain barreled in, her son would not stop calling.
When the storm let up and cell service resumed, she gave in and sent $180.
Once, when she could not get the money to the inmates on time, he was stabbed.
She now sends at least $100 weekly. Though she has sent more than $13,000 since last summer, if she is ever late on her payments, her son said that his food gets held back by inmates working as food runners in the cafeteria. He is terrified to leave his cell because he is frequently attacked, even when escorted to the showers.
“My cellphone rings, and when I see the name of the prison, I want to throw up,” she said. “I am a walking zombie, I am a shell of myself.”
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 Green Dot cards and sent the money to the extorters.
Dorothy, a mother of four from New Mexico who works two jobs, has sent more than $8,000 via Cash App since 2022. 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.
Reporting the crime
Cynthia, Sylvia and Dorothy reported the extortion to law enforcement, from local sheriff’s offices to the Department of Corrections (DOC) and the FBI. Finding those responsible, however, is not so easy.
After Cynthia filed a complaint, the DOC’s 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, and 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 admitted that her son has drug problems, but said the response made it sound like no gang member or other inmate was involved. She said she felt totally abandoned.
How it happens
Contraband cellphones are the principal means through which inmates extort the family members of other inmates, DOC Inspector General Jacob Wheeler said.
In 2022, the DOC 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, and correctional officers are paid off to smuggle them in.
The DOC cannot use cellphone jammers, a technology that blocks all cell signals within the surrounding area, because they are banned by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC deems jammers a threat to public safety because they shut off cell signals beyond where they are installed.
Oklahoma Watch reported on a cellphone detection wristband pilot launched by the DOC in 2020. The pilot 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 DOC. The inmate population 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 DOC 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.
Possible solutions
The FCC 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 FCC 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 DOC 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’s Bureau of Justice Assistance. They purchased SIM card detectors and a small-scale contraband interdiction system that does not require FCC authorization, DOJ reports show. Those systems fall short in some areas. Craig, an expert in contraband interdiction systems, said he is not aware of any data that proves the SIM card detectors reduce the number of phones that enter prisons. The small contraband interdiction system installed by the DOC is portable, so its ability to monitor the flow of contraband is limited.
The DOC is confiscating fewer phones annually at the facilities using that technology, suggesting that either inmates are smuggling fewer phones or the technology is not detecting them.
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 that 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.
Though advancements in technology may offer hope, 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.”
