do you need to have a contract fone for someone in prison to call u on ur cell fone

You may use your cell phone in most cases. The phone service is run by ONE company at any one facility. The companies that provide service win a competitive bid contract for 3-4 years. THEY are the ones that set the pricing and the rules in conjunction with the jail or prison. It used to be that you needed a land line to receive calls from the inmate. Now, with everything revolving around the smartphone, the rules have changed. BUT, the pricing is the problem, (becasue with only one company, there is nothing capping the price except their conscience and the FCC which has done very few favors for the families of inmate).

That brings us to InmateAid's discount service.

Federal is simple, if you are local to the federal prison, the call is six cents per minute or $0.90 for a 15-minute call. If long distance the same call is $0.21 cents per minute or $3.15. Do the math, if you talk 300 minutes at 6 cents, it is $18.00; the same 300 minutes for long distance is $63.00. InmateAid will get you a local phone number for federal for only $8.95 starting April 15th (compared to $19.95 or more for the competition and some InmateAid pricing). 

County Jail has completely different price tiers. Depending on where the inmate is, and what phone company has the contratc, the calls are as much ar $23.75 per 15-minute call. We get the call for $3.15 through the same company (with a different phone number that forwards to your original number). The InmateAid numbers for county will remain at $19.95 for 1000 minutes. You can be sure that if you are paying more that $3.00 per call in the county system, you need to get an estimate from us... the savings are real money, money most of us can't just piss away to a phone company.

If they are telling you that you cannot get a call on your cell phone from the inmate, then our solution to save you money will also get around the "no cell phone rule" as our lines are not cell lines and will be acceptible to receive calls (and forward to your cell without detection).