By DEAN SHALHOUP

Senior Staff Writer

CONCORD – Prison officials continue to investigate what triggered a spate of prisoner unrest that led to a disturbance Saturday in the prison’s Close Custody Unit.

“The root cause of the disturbance remains unknown at this time and the situation remains under investigation” by the state Department of Corrections, department program information officer Tina Thurber said in a statement.

She said that residents of the CCU, upon returning to the unit after their lunch period, initially refused to go back into their cells.

“After discussions with unit officers, all the residents returned to their cells,” Thurber said, adding that “a smaller group of residents” of the CCU “chose to escalate their actions, with a few lighting small fires while others attempted to flood the unit.”

Staff “quickly addressed and mitigated” the fires and flooding, Thurber said. Officials called in members of the department’s Special Emergency Response Team (SERT) to assist prison personnel “in the removal of residents who continued attempting to escalate the situation,” she said.

One resident and one prison staff member sustained minor injuries in the incident, Thurber said.

She credited “the quick and professional response” of prison staff for “quelling” the incident and “containing” it to that specific unit “without the need for assistance from any outside agencies.”

Meanwhile, the CCU remains “in a relative state of lockdown,” Thurber said, which involves limited movement by residents. All other State Prison units, she said, “continue to operate as normal.”

Further, Thurber said, the CCU where the disturbance occurred was under full capacity at the time, “because the department had proactively set aside” an entire tier in the housing unit for medical isolation in the event of a COVID-19 outbreak.

So far, the department has not experienced an outbreak, she added.

Dean Shalhoup may be reached at 594-1256 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com.

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