Susan Ingram was confused when an automated prompt told her she had just 20 seconds to talk with her fiancé, John, a prisoner at the Joseph Harp Correctional Center in Lexington.

She had recently loaded $10 onto her Securus account, enough to pay for at least seven 20-minute calls at the 6-cent per minute rate the Oklahoma Department of Corrections agreed to in February . This was just her fourth call of the Labor Day weekend, made on the evening of Sept. 1.

“Sure enough, I looked at the account, and the previous call we had done cost more than double,” she said. “I was like, what the heck.”

With minimal public notice, the Oklahoma Department of Corrections and Securus Technologies agreed to an amended contract on Aug. 29 that raised the cost of phone calls from state prisons from 6

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