Last summer, I visited McLeod, Oklahoma, home to the state’s largest women’s prison. McLeod is a town of fewer than 5,000 people located on a vast prairie 30 miles east of Oklahoma City. On the outskirts of town, off a rutted road, stands the Mabel Bassett Correctional Center, a concrete and razor wire structure.
I went there to meet April Wilkens. She has spent more than a quarter-century with Mabel Bassett because of the 1998 shooting death of her ex-fiancé Terry Carlton. Wilkens pleaded that after Carlton beat, raped and stalked her, she repeatedly sought help from law enforcement but was met with indifference, according to trial testimony. She was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
More than 20 years later, her case has once again attracted attention. Mr Wilkens was a key figure in pushing for new legislation that would allow victims of domestic violence to seek reduced sentences for crimes stemming from the abuse.
Tulsa attorney Colleen McCarty recognized that the state’s high incarceration rates and the rising human and economic costs of keeping so many people behind bars were creating a breakthrough. Troubled by the dual characteristics of Oklahoma, which consistently has one of the highest rates of female incarceration and domestic violence in the state, she and another Tulsa attorney, Leslie Briggs, visited Wilkens in prison in 2022. At the meeting, lawyers explained that they wanted to pass legislation that could reduce the long sentences faced by survivors of domestic violence, even if the crime was a direct result of abuse. After two years of advocacy, the Oklahoma Survivors Act was passed in 2024.
The law did not automatically reduce the sentences of survivors. Instead, it created a mechanism for seeking redress, requiring proof that domestic violence was a “substantial factor” in the crime, and leaving the final decision to a judge.
When I first heard about the Oklahoma Survivorship Act, I was stunned. I live in Texas and work in criminal justice, so I spend a lot of time tracking where change is politically possible and where it’s not. I knew how unusual it was for ambitious sentencing reform to emerge from a deep red state whose legislators have long supported harsher punishments. Oklahoma has executed 130 people since the death penalty was resumed in 1976, the highest number of executions per capita of any state in the nation.
I wanted to understand how the law came to be and, just as importantly, whether it was working as intended. As I document in my story, “Victims Who Fight Back,” the road to the Oklahoma Survivors Act began with a meeting between these two attorneys and Wilkens in 2022. McCarty and Briggs wanted to know how many women were in prison for crimes related to their abuse. After the meeting, Wilkens came up with a solution. She decided to create a survey asking about the mistreatment of other prisoners. What she wanted to know was how many other women at Mabel Bassett had had cases like hers.
Wilkens distributed the questionnaire over one weekend that fall. She chatted with anyone she saw in the rec yard, the library, or the cafeteria. She could have faced disciplinary action if she conducted a fraudulent survey, but Wilkens, who had a near perfect record, decided it was worth the risk.
For years, she has heard women talk about the violence they endured, but their stories rarely come out in court. She saw the intersection between their abuse and the crimes they continued to commit. Some were charged with failing to protect their children from abusive partners. Some committed crimes with their abusers while being threatened with further harm. As in Wilkens’ case, the crime could not be understood in isolation from previous abuse.
Wilkens stood out as a mentor in Mabel Bassett’s life. She was well-liked and respected, and as she moved around the prison carrying questionnaires, women stopped to listen to her stories. There was no incentive to fill in because laws to help survivors did not yet exist. All that was left was Wilkens’ strong personality and a simple request: “If you have experienced domestic violence and it relates to why you are here, would you please fill out this?”
156 women completed the survey. Mr. McCarty, who later became Wilkens’ lawyer, told me that he was not so engrossed in the women’s stories that he read the book in one sitting, so much so that he had to lie down when he finished. When I went to Tulsa to talk to her last year, she told me she could read too.
I share a brief excerpt of them here because they do more than record personal suffering. They also expose a broader issue: the systemic blind spots that allowed much of these women’s histories to be ignored in police reports, courts, and sentencing decisions.
Fear and fear are the main themes. One woman wrote, “The abuse progressed in stages from emotional to verbal to physical to sexual.”
“He said he was going to kill me and hide the body,” another wrote. “My ex-boyfriend’s wife broke her nose twice.”
“I kept begging for a divorce, but he was threatening to kill my children.”
“Because of the beating, I have lost hearing in my left ear.”
“My children’s father beat me and I barely survived.”
Some respondents, like Wilkens, went on to kill their abusers. One woman wrote, “I didn’t realize I had shot him until the gun went off.”
Another wrote: “One night, out of the blue, I shot and killed my husband.”
Many said the system had failed. “My lawyer was arrested during my trial,” wrote one woman who placed her children in foster care after her arrest. “I didn’t even have a chance.”
“I’m ready to tell my story,” wrote the woman convicted during President Ronald Reagan’s presidency. “I’ve been doing that for a long time.”
The survey became part of the foundation of the legislative push, helping lawmakers understand how often abuse and criminal charges intersect, and how rarely that history is fully considered in court. When the Oklahoma Survivors Act of 2024 was passed, there was hope that it would give Wilkens and other women like Mabel Bassett a chance to meaningfully review their sentences.
However, what I learned through my interviews is how resistant the system is to change. Wilkens remains behind bars, along with many other women with similar stories.
Along with her, there is another prisoner inside Mabel Bassett. The answers to that survey stick with me. “I was in a very abusive and pathological relationship,” she wrote. “I’m free now.”
