Oklahoma Prisoners Made Political Calls for Conservative Super PAC
Prisoners at multiple state prisons in Oklahoma told reporters that, for over one month this year, they had made calls on behalf of an insurance company and political campaigns during primary election season.
As Oklahoma Watch learned through an open records request, the Oklahoma Department of Corrections (DOC) has established call centers at four prisons since January 2026 in partnership with a company called HBW Leads. Those prisons are: James Crabtree in Helena, Mabel Bassett in McLoud, Lexington Correctional and Joseph Harp, both in Lexington.
The DOC’s contracts with HBW Leads allow for the call centers to conduct “telemarketing and political polling activity.” The DOC, the contracts stipulate, earns $10 for each hour that a prisoner works; the prisoners making the calls, however, receive just $2 per hour. The $8 overhead is allocated to Oklahoma Correctional Industries, a DOC entity that operates work programs and job training.
While the contracts specify “polling” as a job function, the political calls made by the prisoners were more similar to push-polling, a marketing technique in which a caller pretends to be administering a poll but, instead, pushes the respondent to support a particular candidate. Push polling is denounced by several polling organizations.
Steve Wilbanks, one of the call center workers who spoke out, said the calls were paid for by Make Liberty Win, a Virginia-based Political Action Committee (PAC) aiming to elect conservative lawmakers. “They weren’t surveys at all, they were campaigning,” he told Oklahoma Watch. “They just had one question at the end of the call: ‘Do we have your vote for such and such?’”
Oklahoma has a history of operating call centers in its state prisons. Prior to the DOC’s contract with HBW Leads, The Intercept, in 2019, found that the presidential campaign of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg paid a third-party vendor that ran a call center in Eddie Warrior Correctional Center in Taft. The call centers were subsequently shut down when, two years later, a prisoner at James Crabtree used his internet access afforded by a call center contracted to Case Energy Partners to download child sexual abuse material in March 2022, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Dec. 27, 2022, online.]
At the new call centers, prisoners said they made up to 800 calls per day during shifts of up to nine hours. If the workers missed quotas or failed to meet managers’ expectations, they could be subjected to penalties.
Source: Oklahoma Watch
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