City & County Jails in New Hampshire
New Hampshire - Inmate Search - All County Jail Rosters
Clicking on any of the New Hampshire Counties or Cities below will direct you to a list of all the City Jails, County Jails and Juvenile Detention Centers in that specific County.
Search for any jail in New Hampshire
New Hampshire county jails and state prisons
New Hampshire has 10 counties, and each one runs a house of corrections. Hillsborough, Rockingham, Merrimack, and Strafford have the beds. Coos, Carroll, and Sullivan are smaller, and a full jail there means a transfer down the highway. Superintendents run the day-to-day. The sheriff is not the jailer in the way a Midwestern sheriff is. City police departments have holding rooms. They are not county jails.
Jails in New Hampshire hold people before trial and people serving a sentence of a year or less. A longer felony sentence goes to the Department of Corrections. A federal sentence goes to the Bureau of Prisons. FCI Berlin, with a small camp, is the only federal prison in the state. It sits on the same road as the state prison in Berlin, and the two get mixed up.
The men’s prison is the New Hampshire State Prison in Concord, on North State Street. It is old enough that a replacement is the largest capital project the state has talked about. An August 2026 study put a new 1,500-bed prison, on the same campus, at a minimum of $750 million. The women’s prison is on that same Concord campus, behind the men’s prison. Northern New Hampshire Correctional Facility is in Berlin. Transitional units in Concord and Manchester are the step-down beds. These are not extra county jails.
How many county jails are there in New Hampshire?
Ten counties, ten houses of corrections. When one holds someone for another county, for the state, or for the U.S. Marshals, it bills a daily rate. Hillsborough is the jail most families are looking for. A person arrested in Manchester or Nashua starts there.
How many juvenile detention centers are there in New Hampshire?
One. The John H. Sununu Youth Services Center in Manchester is the state’s secure youth facility. The Department of Health and Human Services runs it, not the counties and not the Department of Corrections. It holds youth waiting on a hearing and youth who have been committed. A new, smaller campus in Hampstead was about 90 percent built in July 2026, and the state planned to start the move in January 2027. Until that move happens, the listing is Manchester.
Search the county of the arrest. The adult listing is that county’s house of corrections. The youth listing is the Sununu Youth Services Center.
What the first days in a New Hampshire county jail are like
The first day is a line and a search. Identity, prints, a medical screen, clothes bagged, one phone call if the line is open. The person has not been convicted. The unit still runs on counts. There is no phone in the cell, no glasses until property is checked, and no way to know if the job, the apartment, the car, or the kids are covered. A parent in Hillsborough can spend the first night wondering who is picking a child up from school.
The ordinary things are the hard ones. The uniform does not fit. The bunk is thin, and someone is snoring, talking, or sick in the next bed. Meals are plain and on a clock. Mail is slow. A visit may not come. In January the holding cell is cold. Withdrawal from alcohol, opioids, or methamphetamine can start before arraignment, and the night is when that gets loud. Officers who apply the rules the same way to everyone run a quieter floor. Uneven rules are how contraband moves. Hillsborough and Rockingham can separate by risk. A North Country jail often cannot.
Tablets, video visits, and deposits have taken some of the isolation out of the larger jails. Movies, messages, and a way to put money on an account do not fix the bed or the case. Those accounts can be shut off. Each county page on this site lists the jail phone, the vendor, and the way to send money for that house of corrections.