This is an opinion column.

The woman asked forgiveness before she told her story. She was afraid, she said, that she might lose composure.

She did not.

She was worried and sleepless and scared, she told me, though she did not need to say it. Those things have taken up residence in her voice.

I’m going to call this woman Sarah, which is not her name, and not something I do lightly. But I am convinced her story is worth telling, and that using her real name could cause her son harm. And Sarah came to the conversation with proof.

Sarah is the mother of an adult son with learning disabilities, with the mind of an eighth-grader, she says. He now serves a long sentence in the Alabama prison system, and the crime for which he was convicted is serious. But that is not the point here.

The point is what Alabama allows to happen to inmates and their families once they are locked inside. Once they are thrown away. It is one of the state’s biggest moral failings, and that’s saying something. It is a crime itself, and not just in a figurative way.

Sarah, over recent weeks, has worried night after night that she would wake up to learn her son was dead. She has received threats on a contraband inmate cell phone, told she must send money to cell block bullies or her son will be stabbed, killed, cut to ribbons.

Extortion, in Alabama prisons, is a way of life.

Sarah’s experience with it began in March, when she got a phone call from her son – let’s call him Sonny – from a standard prison payphone. He told her he had “got into something” and needed $150 immediately.

“I jumped on him and I said, ‘What the hell are you talking about? I just gave you $200,’” she said.

But she heard someone talking in the background, and recognized that Sonny’s voice sounded strained.

“I’ve never heard him sound like that before,” she said. “So I said, well, I can’t get it today. It’ll be tomorrow.”

That was the beginning.

Sonny emailed her later, from his prison tablet, to explain that he had accidentally stepped on a prison gang leader’s bluetooth earphones, and had been threatened if she didn’t pay. Sarah agreed to send him $90 immediately, and $60 when she got it.

“My son paid him the $150, but it was in the span of three days,” she said. “This is when it became critical.”

Because there is always a reason for more.

Extortion in Alabama prisons is not new. It is not a secret. It is “routine,” as the U.S. Justice Department said in a 2020 lawsuit.

“Prisoners routinely threaten or subject other prisoners to violence in order to coerce family and friends of the victim to transfer money in exchange for their loved one’s safety,” the Trump Justice Department argued in December 2020. “Prisoners have been ‘kidnapped’ by other prisoners and forcibly held, against their will, for multiple days while prisoner-captors extort the hostage-prisoner’s family and friends.”

ADOC staff “have failed to intervene when alerted to potential extortion,” it said.

Which says it all. Until you hear a mother, like Sarah, struggling to know what to do, to know who to call, to wonder with every step if her intervention will save her child or condemn him.

“More people need to speak out,” she said. “But they are scared.”

Sonny told Sarah the heavy took the original $150, but demanded another $150 because the payment was “late.” He then demanded another $300, because extortionists do what extortionists do. Sarah did not have that kind of money.

Sonny told her he’d been threatened by inmates with knives.

“I’m in danger I’m trying to get out the dorm can you call,” he messaged.

Sarah got a call from another inmate’s contraband cell phone, and was put on speaker as her son begged for more money. He later messaged her on his tablet that he had been held by eight inmates and forced to talk on the phone.

“Mom,” he wrote. “I need to be moved.”

She says her son was frightened – and embarrassed that he was frightened – because the gang member put out a “hit” on him.

Which might seem dramatic if you haven’t heard other parents speak of it, or Justice Department findings that unequivocally say failure to pay debts in Alabama prisons “leads to beatings, kidnappings, stabbings, sexual abuse and homicides.”

They have not slowed since then.

If that’s not stark enough, the prison officials “fail adequately to protect prisoners from death even when ADOC officials have advance warning,” according to Justice. Sometimes they “watch a violent or troubling incident unfold and do not intervene.”

Sarah says her son went to a sergeant and gave him the names of three people who threatened to kill him.

“The sergeant that was on duty told him to go back and call his lawyer,” she said. “When he was pushed back into his cell, three gang members came in and robbed him of all his commissary supplies. He has nothing to eat.”

Sarah has been on the phone for days, weeks, talking to prison officials at various levels. Some have been kind and helpful. One moved her son to a safer location, but in minutes another moved him back into his previous cellblock, and danger, she said.

“He had a complete meltdown,” Sarah said. “He started beating his head on filing cabinets and concrete wall so they snatched him up, took all his stuff and put him under suicide watch. He was under suicide watch for seven days.”

She asked one officer if her son was on drugs, and was told they didn’t drug test in prison but that her son did not seem to be using.

I asked the Department of Corrections to talk about extortion in the prisons, to at least explain what happens in such circumstances. Thus far the answers have not come.

Alabama Rep. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa, hears from a lot of inmates’ families, and his office heard from Sarah, too. Finding individual solutions is hard, but broad solutions are harder. Even after the Justice Department report and lawsuit pointed out stark problems.

“We don’t have a plan,” England said.

Every answer from the state and the governor’s office is about building a single new prison that will cost a billion dollars and not be inhabitable for years. All as paroles grind to a halt and overcrowding continues.

“There is abject negligence and unwillingness to do anything creative in the prison system,” he said. “Now it’s just worse.”

Perhaps the answer is begging the federal government, which starkly pointed out our flaws, to intervene, he said.

“It’s Alabama inertia on a whole new level,” he said.

Families will continue to suffer. At least, England said, Sarah’s family received a little good news. Her son was finally moved to protective custody.

After a month of threats and a spate of phone calls, he messaged her to say he was, for now anyway, safe. He got some sleep.

At last, she slept, too.

John Archibald is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for AL.com.