Officials at the Bowden Institution have reopened the medium-security facility near Innisfail following a four-day lockdown necessitated after a rash of fights among the facility’s inmates.
Dan Spiller, a media spokesperson with the institution, said officials placed the institution under a lockdown at 8 a.m. on Sept. 2 based on intelligence gathered following an “abnormal” number of incidents that week. Spiller confirmed there were six fights featuring different inmates.
“They were all one-on-one fights,” he said. “There were no gang issues or anything like that. It was strictly two individuals in each occasion.”
All of the altercations were minor in nature and none of the inmates involved required hospitalization, Spiller noted. He added that no weapons were involved.
Spiller said the lockdown was instituted to ensure the safety of the institution’s staff, 564 medium-security inmates and members of the public while a search was conducted. All visits to the institution’s medium-security facility were cancelled while the search was conducted.
The lockdown was finally lifted at 4 p.m. on Sept. 5.
During the search, prison officials were looking for weapons as well as any other contraband items, Spiller explained.
“That’s always part of the policy, as well as investigating what root cause there may be for these incidents to have occurred in the first place,” he said. “And (to) gather intelligence.”
Officials at the institution will continue to monitor the situation and will impose another lockdown if the problem presents itself again, Spiller said.
“We will deal with it accordingly at the time,” he said. “We don’t foresee that anything will arise in the near term.”
The latest lockdown is at least the fourth this year, following others in April, May and June – the latter following the murder of an inmate on June 19. Spiller said it was not out of the ordinary to have that many lockdowns.
The institution’s minimum-security annex, which currently houses 76 offenders, remained open for the duration of the lockdown, Spiller explained.
