Transfers & Facility Placement in New Hampshire (NHDOC)
Where NHDOC places people — men's intake in Concord, the Berlin transfer, transitional housing — and how to track someone who moves.
Where People Go
New Hampshire splits custody by statute: a sentence with a maximum term of more than one year is served in state prison, and a maximum of a year or less is served in the house of corrections of the county where the crime was committed. The county facilities belong to the ten counties — each sets its own visiting, mail, and phone rules, and NHDOC has no jurisdiction over them.
The state system itself is small: the New Hampshire State Prison for Men in Concord (medium through maximum custody, and the intake unit), the New Hampshire Correctional Facility for Women in Concord, and the Northern New Hampshire Correctional Facility in Berlin (minimum through close custody, men). The Secure Psychiatric Unit on the men’s prison grounds is a separate medical-forensic unit — it holds people from state and county facilities along with civilly committed patients, under the department’s medical division rather than a warden.
Intake
A man entering state custody goes to the Reception & Diagnostic (R&D) unit at the Concord men’s prison: an ID number, photographs and fingerprints, then roughly 30 days of medical, dental, and education screenings, with new arrivals kept separate from the rest of the unit until medically cleared. Visiting starts before classification ends — one visit a week once the person is medically cleared, until a permanent housing assignment. After the initial classification board, the person either stays in a Concord housing unit or transfers to Berlin.
Women’s intake happens at the Concord women’s facility, whose posted visiting schedule includes its own Reception & Diagnostic unit with the same one-visit-a-week rule. Beyond that, the department posts no current women’s resident manual, so the women’s facility’s front desk — (603) 271-0200 — answers what the first weeks involve.
Classification
Custody runs from C5 (special housing) down to C1 (transitional housing), and the classification level shapes family contact directly: visiting allowances drop at C4 and C5, and the visiting block depends on the housing unit — both covered in Visiting in New Hampshire.
In the last two years of a sentence, people can step down to the transitional units: the Calumet house in Manchester, the North End unit and Shea Farm in Concord, and the Transitional Work Center on the Concord prison grounds — minimum-custody settings with their own published phone numbers.
What a Transfer Changes
A Concord-to-Berlin move (or back) changes three things at once: the visiting schedule — each prison posts its own unit-based schedule, and the two differ — the mailing address, and the travel: Berlin sits 120 miles north of Concord in the North Country.
NHDOC publishes no system for notifying families when someone is moved. The published notification right belongs to victims of felony crimes, who can register with the Victim Services Unit (1-888-646-6842) for notice of facility transfers, custody changes, and releases. For everyone else, the practical channels are the person’s own call and the locator.
New Hampshire is also a party to the New England and national interstate corrections compacts, and people do serve time across state lines in both directions — the department’s FY2022 annual report counted 178 New Hampshire–sentenced people in other jurisdictions in mid-2022.
Tracking Where Someone Is
The NHDOC Inmate Locator lives at business.nh.gov/inmate_locator/ — an official state tool linked from the department’s website. It searches by full or partial name and shows the housing facility, sentencing information, parole-eligibility date, and maximum release date; if a name is listed, the person is currently incarcerated. People in county houses of corrections never appear — county facility contacts are at nhcounties.org.
By phone, NHDOC releases nothing about an incarcerated person without a release-of-information form the person initiates through their case manager — a call to the department without one gets only what the locator already shows.
Verify Before Acting
Sources
This page is compiled from the following publicly available sources. Policies change without notice — confirm current details with the facility before relying on them.