Phone Calls at Lon Evans Corrections Center: Smart Communications

The Free Call at Booking, and Its Limit

Each holding cell has a phone that can be used during booking to arrange bail, tell family what has happened, or reach an attorney. Those calls are free.

The limit is geographic. Free calls work only within the local dialing area. Anything outside it goes through the collect phones instead, which means a family member in another area code is paying from the first call. If the person you are waiting to hear from is being booked and you live out of the area, that is the reason the first call may come as a collect call rather than a free one.

Why We Cannot Print a Rate

Tarrant County publishes no per-minute rate. Its page directs families to contact Smart Communications for collect fees in their area, and the vendor confirms that rates appear only on the deposit screen once a facility is selected.

There are national figures circulating that are easy to mistake for a price. The FCC caps what any provider may charge, and as of February 2025 those caps sit at 12 cents a minute for prisons, 14 cents for jails holding 1,000 or more people, and 21 cents for jails under 1,000. Tarrant County holds around 4,200 people, so the 14-cent cap is the ceiling that applies. A ceiling is not a rate, and the actual negotiated price could be lower.

Some vendor-side consumer pricing is published and is not facility-specific: credits are a cent each with a 500-credit minimum, which works out to a $5.00 minimum purchase, plus a $3.00 processing fee per transaction. Electronic messages run 50 cents each and photos $1.00.

Setting Up an Account

The account is held with Smart Communications rather than with the county, and 1-727-349-1561 is the customer care line for it.

Two things are worth confirming when you set it up: which number the person can call, and whether that number needs to be registered to your account before it will connect. Prepaid balances at most vendors are tied either to the receiving phone number or to the person inside, and which model applies changes what happens if you switch phones.

Phone Money Is Not Commissary Money

This is the single most common and most expensive mistake at this jail, and Tarrant County never states it plainly on either page.

Deposits for commissary run through Access Corrections. Phone calls run through Smart Communications. They are different companies with different accounts, and Access Corrections states outright that it has no access to the facility’s inmate trust account. Putting money on the books does nothing for phone calls, and a Smart Communications balance cannot buy commissary.

Our send money guide covers the Access Corrections side.

Video and Messaging

Smart Communications sells a video visiting product called SmartVisit and handles electronic messaging. Whether Tarrant County has video visitation switched on is not published, and no rate for it appears anywhere on the county’s site.

The county’s mail arrangement makes messaging relevant even if video is not available: personal letters are scanned by Smart Communications and delivered to the tablet, so the same vendor sits on both the phone and the mail side. Asking about tablet messaging when you call about phone rates is efficient.

Monitoring

Calls may be monitored and recorded. The standard exception is a properly placed call to an attorney, though the burden is usually on the person inside to have the attorney’s number registered as privileged. Anything said on a monitored line can be used in a case, which is worth being conscious of while charges are pending.