Tarrant County jail officials show off new home for 'worst of the worst'

By Steve Campbell

sfcampbell@star-telegram.com

FORT WORTH -- The newest accommodations in downtown Fort Worth are the last place you would ever want to stay.

Rooms are only 40 square feet and the starkly modern furnishings consist of a concrete floor, a stainless steel toilet and sink, a tiny steel desktop and a raised concrete bed with a thin mattress.

If you are good, you can exercise alone in the gym, which amounts to an empty bigger room, three days of the week.

Room service is the only dining option -- ever.

Misbehaving? Then you get the "separation" room with a tad more space and a shower. In this special-guest category, you can't go to the "gym," so workouts will come via a Jack LaLanne or Richard Simmons exercise video displayed on a monitor rolled up in front of your always-locked door. (Seriously.)

And when your friends, family or lawyer come to see you, the "visit" will be held on a video visitation system. Visitors will never leave the airy public area, which looks just like a nice hotel lobby. Once they've checked in with the front desk, they'll sit in a video booth and connect with you on that same movable monitor where Simmons encouraged you to sweat.

Welcome to the Lon Evans Corrections Center, Tarrant County's new $78.6 million "supermax" that will soon be home to the "worst of the worst" prisoners among the 4,000 or so men and women the county routinely houses.

Tarrant County commissioners and Sheriff Dee Anderson held a ribbon-cutting Tuesday and gave several hundred curious folks a chance to see what life will be like inside the 444-bed maximum-security facility.

And life inside, where only religious or legal reading materials will be allowed, won't be pleasant. The threat of such a beyond-Spartan lockdown will help improve behavior at other county jails, officials said.

From the outside, the 207,000-square-foot lockup looks nothing like a jailhouse.

The upper stories feature lots of attractive paned windows. No bars are in sight.

One passer-by on Tuesday even asked whether it was the courthouse. And he wasn't far off; the first floor is clad in the same distinctive pink granite used on the historic Tarrant County Courthouse a few blocks east on Weatherford Street.

That would have made the sheriff smile.

An hour before, Anderson, who was elected in 2000, told the crowd that he faced the toughest fight of his political career in locating the jail in the heart of downtown.

Some downtown proponents opposed building another jail in the city core. Anderson argued that maximum-security prisoners needed to be housed next to the existing Corrections Center adjacent to the Tim Curry Criminal Justice Center, which holds the criminal courts.

The location permits prisoners to be moved through a sky bridge connecting the two jails and through tunnels linking all three buildings.

"You don't want to be moving your worst-of-the-worst criminals on the streets. People don't escape from jails; they escape when you are moving," Anderson told the Star-Telegram last year. "The day that jail opens, this county will be a safer place."

Another long-term Tarrant County sheriff also got his due at the ceremony.

Earlier Tuesday, county commissioners approved naming the new facility after Sheriff Lon Evans, who served six terms from 1960 to 1984 and died in 1992.

In a tribute to the former "high sheriff of Tarrant County," County Judge Glen Whitley said Evans was "a colorful and beloved" character who would have approved of the "state-of-the-art" facility.

Evans was a star athlete in multiple sports at Polytechnic High School. He then played football at TCU, where in his senior year in 1932 he led the Horned Frogs to a Southwest Conference championship. The 6-2, 225-pound guard played five seasons for the Green Bay Packers, helping the team win the NFL championship in 1936. He was twice voted All-Pro and in 1977 he was elected to the Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame.

He then spent more than three decades officiating high school, college and NFL games. Evans worked at the Fort Worth bomber plant during World War II and in sales before becoming an investigator for the Tarrant County district attorney's office.

Evans then jumped into politics, which he loved, said his daughter, Kitty Evans Loveless.

"I feel his presence here today, I really do. I know he would be extremely honored and deeply humbled to have the most outstanding maximum-security facility in the United States bear his name," she said.

Executive Chief Deputy Bob Knowles says that jailers are training on the center's new systems and procedures and that a "staged move-in" of prisoners will start in the fall.

In the meantime, he expects that the corrections center will be "encouraging better behavior" at the county's other jails.

"People are not going to want to be here," he said.

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