A weapon for extortion long ignored in Alabama prisons: cellphones

If a single inmate could reflect Alabama’s dysfunctional prison system, it might be a tall man with a walled right eye and a drug-addled past, trying to survive at a violent penitentiary with a thriving shadow market in contraband.

His name was Joseph Michael Wood, and he was doing life at the St Clair maximum-security prison for a couple of inept armed robberies. But he made the best of it, taking courses in everything from anger management to engine repair and proudly sending each certificate of completion to his mother.

He also used cellphones, which are banned in prison, to beg her and other relatives incessantly for money. His family often heard other voices in the background, instructing him on what to say.

It’s a matter of life and death, he would implore. You don’t know what it’s like in here.

A relative finally ended what was clearly extortion. “I told everybody to stop sending money,” a cousin, Steven Davis, recalled. “He might get beat up, but they will stop when they know they can’t get any more money.”

One night in July 2017, after two pleading calls from his imprisoned cousin, Davis refused to answer a third. Soon after, the family received another call, this time from the prison chaplain. Wood had been strangled in his cell. He was 33.

“I just screamed and screamed,” his mother, Angela Wood, recalled.

“I was worried people were going to start blaming me,” Davis said. “But I never heard a word.”

The authorities have not established a connection between the killing of Wood and the extortion of his family. But his case reflects how the longtime indifference of the Alabama Department of Corrections — including its failure for many years to crack down on cellphones, which seem almost as easy to obtain behind bars as at a Best Buy — had terrifying consequences for those beyond the prison walls.

Inmates have used contraband phones to issue threats, demand money and transmit photographic evidence of what happens when payment is not made. Their boldness seems boundless: Even the chair of the state Senate’s Judiciary Committee has received threatening calls and text messages from Alabama inmates.

In a lawsuit filed against corrections officials last summer, Angela Wood said her son would call from the prison 200 miles away to say he was being threatened with assault “if he did not pay the inmates certain sums of money.”

Joseph Wood would “frantically beg” his mother to send the funds, the lawsuit says. He repeatedly told prison officials about the lax security in the unit where he was housed, and eventually murdered.

Jeff Dunn, the state corrections commissioner, said in an interview this year that he was frustrated by the continuing problem of illicit cellphones in Alabama prisons. But he said their proliferation reflected an “unfortunate nexus” of factors: not enough corrections officers guarding too many inmates in old facilities with too many blind spots.

“It makes it exceptionally difficult for our correctional officers to be everywhere all the time,” Dunn said. “And so these types of things, we freely admit, go on.”

Wood was killed in a closely monitored cellblock, yet it was more than two years before another inmate was charged with his murder. Authorities blamed the delay on a long wait for forensics results.

Wood’s cousin, Davis, questioned how cellphones could be so common in prison.

“With no cellphones, there would be no extortion,” he said. “They can literally take a picture of a loved one beaten up and say: ‘This happened today. And it will be worse tomorrow.’”

Prisons Overrun by Phones

“Go ahead and put your cellphones up, so’s we don’t have to go and take ’em.”

That call went out whenever corrections officers conducted their sweeps, according to Bobby Monaghan, who spent a decade at the St. Clair prison in Springville before his assault conviction was vacated in 2018.

Monaghan, 55, and others described a nerve-jangling dystopia behind bars, in which street gangs — sometimes in tandem with corrupt officers — controlled the sale of smuggled contraband, including drugs and phones.

If the loved ones of an inmate targeted for extortion will not pay, then that prisoner is “going to get stabbed up,” Monaghan said. “That’s just how the Alabama prison system works.”

The Justice Department agrees. In a bluntly critical report last year, the federal agency accused the state of “deliberate indifference” by failing to address problems that jeopardise inmate safety, including overcrowding, understaffing, the smuggling of contraband and extortion.

Alabama is not alone in having troubled, violent prisons, or in struggling to stop the illegal use of cellphones. But the state has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country, and its prisons are antiquated and short-staffed, creating danger for employees and inmates alike.

Dunn, who became corrections commissioner in 2015, did not dispute many of the systemic issues cited by federal investigators. Alabama’s prisons are near 160% of capacity, the department said, and most of its facilities have less than half the necessary staffing.

But Dunn said that he and the governor, Kay Ivey, who took office in 2017, were determined to end the decades-old culture of indifference they inherited. He noted that the state recently raised the salaries of its corrections officers — they now make an average of close to $50,000 a year — and said it was putting into place a plan for long-term change.

“We need to shift from warehousing inmates to rehabilitating individuals,” he said.

Charlotte Morrison, a senior attorney with the Equal Justice Initiative, a prisoners rights organisation in Montgomery, said she had heard all this before. And still the violence and extortion continue unabated.

“We get calls and emails from families saying that if they don’t, for instance, pay $200 by midnight, their son will be raped,” Morrison said.

“The extorted families are traumatised,” she added. “And they run out of money and become even more traumatised.”

The pervasiveness of cellphones in American prisons has exasperated corrections officials for years, even as they sometimes expose troubling conditions. The devices — dropped by drones, thrown over walls, smuggled inside basketballs — have been linked to murder plots, escape attempts and assorted other crimes. Last year, authorities in South Carolina exposed a ring of inmates using cellphones to dupe members of the military through dating apps, and charged an inmate with orchestrating a woman’s murder by cellphone.

The most obvious solution, to jam cellphone signals, is illegal. The Federal Communications Commission says jamming technology would also interfere with 911 calls and other communications related to public safety.

‘I Need You to Send It’

According to people who have spent time inside Alabama’s prisons, the scams typically work like this:

An inmate, often affiliated with a prison gang, will linger near the commissary to identify any prisoner spending a lot on incidentals — a tip-off that someone on the outside is replenishing that person’s account. Soon the inmate is coerced into surrendering the cellphone numbers for his loved ones.

Prisoners addicted to drugs are the most common targets, according to Louis Singleton Jr., an inmate at the Kilby maximum-security prison in Montgomery. “It opens doors for people to extort them and their families.”

Singleton, 44, a prisoners rights advocate who is 26 years into a life sentence for murder, said addicts fell into debt by promising to pay later for drugs. The interest can be astronomical. “A guy can owe $30,” he said. “And by the end of the month, it could be $300 or more.”

Addicts in debt then face unrelenting pressure to call people on the outside for the money they owe, Singleton said. Relatives are instructed to send the cash to a particular account through various money-transfer services, such as Walmart2Walmart, or prepaid debit cards.

Shakedowns sometimes involve a cooperating officer, who might help to identify which inmates have cash at their disposal. “Guards can find more info on someone than anybody,” said Monaghan, the former St Clair inmate. “Say, ‘This guy’s folks got money.’”

Singleton agreed. “The guards can be in on it,” he said. “The inmate can tell the officer, ‘Turn your back for a few minutes while I beat the crap out of the guy who owes me money.’”

In some cases, the inmate purporting to be at risk is in on the scam. Last year, investigators determined that a prisoner at the Bibb medium-security prison in Brent had conspired with two other inmates to extort his sister. The woman, who had paid the $300 demanded for her brother’s safety, decided not to press charges against him.

No matter what, Singleton said, an inmate should never admit he is in danger.

“If you say something on the phone like, ‘I need help because I’m being extorted,’ you’re likely to have the hell beaten out of you or get stabbed,” he said. “And the same or worse will happen if you don’t pay.”

Singleton spoke several times with a reporter — from prison, by illegal cellphone.

More Than Just an Inmate

Angela Wood still has her dead son’s letters of apology.

“I’m sorry if I made you feel that way,” he wrote once. “I am going to take care of you Momma when I get out — please believe that.”

By age 16, Joseph Wood, the second-oldest of her six children, was addicted to crack cocaine, and received treatment. “But he could not beat it,” his mother recalled.

In 2006, Joseph Wood pleaded guilty to breaking into a car. Five years later, he was convicted of the armed robbery of two convenience stores.

Angela Wood, 58, said she cries when she thinks about what her Joseph endured as an inmate. The thought of him being strangled in his cell.

But also the memory of his voice, so anxious, when he would call on one of those cellphones he never should have had access to in the first place.

You don’t know what it’s like in here.

© 2020 The New York Times Company