Last summer, I traveled to McLoud, Oklahoma, home to the state’s largest women’s prison. McLoud — a town of fewer than 5,000 residents — lies 30 miles east of Oklahoma City on a wide expanse of prairie. At the edge of town, off a rutted road, stands Mabel Bassett Correctional Center, a sprawl of concrete and razor wire.
I went there to meet April Wilkens, who has spent more than a quarter century at Mabel Bassett for the 1998 shooting death of her ex-fiancé, Terry Carlton. Wilkens had repeatedly sought help from law enforcement after Carlton beat, raped and stalked her — pleas that, according to trial testimony, were met with indifference. She was convicted of first-degree murder and handed a life sentence.
More than two decades later, her case drew renewed attention. Wilkens became a central figure in the push for new legislation that would allow survivors of domestic violence to seek reduced sentences when their crimes stemmed from their abuse.
The state’s high incarceration rate — and the mounting human and financial costs of keeping so many people behind bars — had created an opening, one that a Tulsa lawyer named Colleen McCarty recognized. Troubled by Oklahoma’s dual distinction as a state that consistently has one of the highest rates of female imprisonment and of domestic abuse, she and another Tulsa attorney, Leslie Briggs, visited Wilkens in prison in 2022. In that meeting, the lawyers explained that they wanted to pass legislation that could reduce the long sentences that survivors of domestic abuse faced, even when their crimes were a direct result of their abuse. After two years of advocacy, the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act was passed into law in 2024.
The law did not automatically reduce survivors’ sentences. Instead, it created a mechanism for them to petition for relief — requiring them to demonstrate that domestic abuse was a “substantial contributing factor” in their offense and leaving the ultimate decision to a judge.
When I first heard about the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act, I was floored. I live in Texas and cover criminal justice, so I spend a lot of time tracking where change is — and isn’t — politically possible. I knew how unusual it was for ambitious sentencing reform to emerge from a deep red state where lawmakers have long favored harsh punishment. Oklahoma, which has put to death 130 people since capital punishment resumed in 1976, has the most executions per capita of any state in the nation.
I wanted to understand how that law came to be, and, just as importantly, if it was working as intended. As I chronicle in my story, “The Victims Who Fought Back,” the path to the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act began with that meeting in 2022 between the two lawyers and Wilkens. McCarty and Briggs wanted a sense of how many women were imprisoned for crimes tied to their own abuse. After their meeting, Wilkens came up with a solution; she decided to draft a questionnaire asking other prisoners about the abuse they had endured. She wanted to know: How many other women at Mabel Bassett had cases like hers?
Wilkens distributed the questionnaire one weekend that fall. She chatted up anyone she saw in the rec yard, the library, the chow hall. Conducting an unauthorized survey could’ve earned her a disciplinary write-up, but Wilkens, who had a nearly spotless record, decided it was a risk worth taking.
For years, she had listened to women describe the violence they had endured — stories that had barely surfaced in courtrooms, if at all. She could see the intersection between their abuse and the crimes they went on to commit. Some had been prosecuted for failing to protect their children from their abusive partners; others had committed crimes alongside their abusers under threat of further harm — offenses that, like Wilkens’, could not be understood apart from the abuse that preceded them.
Among Mabel Bassett’s lifers, Wilkens stood out as a leader; she was well-liked and respected, and as she moved through the prison with her questionnaire, women stopped to hear what she had to say. There was no incentive to fill it out, because no law yet existed to help survivors. There was only Wilkens’ force of personality and a simple request: “If you’ve experienced domestic violence, and that’s connected to why you’re here, will you fill this out?”
One hundred and fifty-six women filled out the survey. McCarty, who would go on to become Wilkens’ attorney, told me she read them in a single sitting, so unmoored by the women’s stories that she had to lie down when she finished. When I went to talk to her last year in Tulsa, she told me that I could read them, too.
I’m sharing brief excerpts of them here because they do more than document individual suffering. They also expose something broader: the systemic blind spots that allowed so many of these women’s histories to go unheard in police reports, courtrooms and sentencing decisions.
Fear and terror are the predominant themes. “The abuse graduated from emotional to verbal to physical to sexual,” wrote one woman.
“He said he was going to kill me and hide the body,” wrote another. “His wife before me had her nose broken twice.”
“I kept begging for a divorce and he’d threaten to kill my children.”
“From the beating I received, my left ear I don’t hear well.”
“My children’s father he beat me barely made it out alive.”
A fraction of the respondents had, like Wilkens, gone on to kill their abusers. “I didn’t realize I shot him until the gun went off,” wrote one woman.
Another wrote, “One night just snapped, shot & killed my husband.”
Many described a system that had failed them. “My lawyer was arrested during my trial,” wrote one woman whose children were put in foster care after her arrest. “I never even got a chance.”
“Am ready to tell my story,” wrote a woman who was convicted when Ronald Reagan was president. “Have been for a long time.”
The questionnaires became part of the foundation for a legislative push, helping lawmakers grasp how often abuse and criminal charges intersected, and how rarely that history was fully considered in court. When the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act passed in 2024, there was hope that it would offer women like Wilkens and others at Mabel Bassett a meaningful second look at their sentences.
What I learned through my reporting, though, is just how resistant that system can be to change. Wilkens, along with many other women with similar stories, still waits behind bars.
With her, inside Mabel Bassett, is another prisoner whose response to the questionnaire has stayed with me: “I was in a very abusive, sick relationship,” she wrote. “I am FREE now.”
