Phone Calls from the Bowie County Jail. What We Could Confirm

What We Could Confirm, and What We Could Not

Two phone numbers for this jail hold up against an official source.

The Bowie County Sheriff’s Office answers on (903) 798-3149, at 100 North Stateline Ave in Texarkana. The federal Intergovernmental Service Agreement covering this jail lists a facility contact of (903) 798-3150. Those are the numbers to work from.

Everything else about calling is unconfirmed. Bowie County publishes no phone provider, no rates, no per call or per minute charges, no call length limit, no account setup instructions and no policy on how calls are monitored. There is no jail website carrying any of it, and the sheriff’s office page does not cover phones at all.

That is the honest position, and it is a better starting point than a confident answer that turns out to be five years old.

Why We Are Not Naming a Phone Vendor Here

Directory sites are consistent on this jail’s phone vendor. They name the same company, give a toll free deposit line and describe a kiosk in the lobby. It would be easy to repeat.

We checked the county website, the sheriff’s office page, the county roster site, and the named vendor’s own list of facilities. The county sources say nothing about phones. The vendor’s own facility list came back with no entry for this jail.

So what we have is several third party pages agreeing with each other and no primary source agreeing with any of them. Those pages are also the same ones that still describe this jail as operated by LaSalle Corrections, whose contract ended on February 12, 2021, and still name a sheriff who left office that January. Consistency between copies is not confirmation.

Naming the wrong vendor here has a real cost. Someone sets up an account with a company that does not serve this jail, funds it, and finds out when the call does not connect. We would rather send you to the sheriff’s office with the right question.

The Information Line That Appears Only on Directory Sites

There is a third phone number in circulation for this jail, an information line in the 903-798 range that appears on aggregator listings and nowhere on a county page.

It may well work. It appears on enough listings that it probably came from somewhere real at some point. But it is not published by Bowie County, we could not confirm it, and a phone number is exactly the kind of detail that gets copied between directory sites long after it stops being answered.

If the number you have for this jail did not come from the sheriff’s office, treat a ring with no answer as a stale listing rather than a closed office, and fall back to (903) 798-3149.

Four Questions That Settle It

One call to (903) 798-3149 covers everything this page could not confirm. These four questions are what to ask.

1. Which company handles inmate phone calls, and what is the correct website or number to set up an account?
2. How does the person in custody get calls to a specific number, and does the number need to be approved or funded first?
3. What does a call cost, and is it charged per minute or per call?
4. Is there a call length limit, and are there hours when calls are not allowed?

Ask the vendor question first. Every other answer depends on it, and it is the one detail that no source outside the jail can currently be trusted on.

One thing that does not vary: calls from a county jail are recorded and monitored, apart from properly established legal calls with an attorney. That is standard across Texas county jails and it is worth assuming here even though Bowie County publishes no policy saying so.