The New York State Police are investigating the death of a prisoner over the weekend in a facility near the central New York prison where another inmate was fatally beaten by guards in December. Prison officials said on Saturday that an inmate at Mid-State Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison in Marcy, N.Y., near Utica, was pronounced dead at a hospital. Officials did not identify the man and released no additional details about the circumstances surrounding his death, but nine prisoners interviewed by The New York Times on Sunday, seven of whom agreed to have their names used, said the inmate had been brutally beaten by corrections officers. Their accounts could not be independently confirmed. Thomas Mailey, a prisons spokesman, said the death was under investigation. A spokeswoman for the New York attorney general, Letitia James, said her office was conducting a preliminary assessment. Deaths that appear to be from other than natural causes or a known medical condition are investigated by the Office of the Attorney General, the New York State Police and the state corrections department’s Office of Special Investigations.
The inmate who died was a 22-year-old man who had entered custody in May and was serving a five-year sentence for second-degree criminal possession of a weapon. His death followed that of another prisoner, 43-year-old Robert Brooks, who died on Dec. 9 at Marcy Correctional Facility, across the street from Mid-State. Ten officers have been criminally charged in Brooks’s death, six of them with murder, after they were captured on body-worn cameras beating and choking him in the infirmary. The latest fatality comes amid a mounting crisis in the New York State prison system, where wildcat strikes by thousands of corrections officers are expected to enter a third week. It is the fifth death in the prison system since the strikes began. At least one of the deaths was a suicide. Corrections officers at nearly all of the state’s 42 prisons, including Mid-State, have been on strike since Feb. 17 — without the backing of their union and in defiance of a judge’s order — to protest what they say are dangerous working conditions, severe staffing shortages and forced overtime. The state’s corrections commissioner, Daniel Martuscello III, announced on X that he was giving the officers until Monday to return to work. Some prisoners’ rights advocates have accused officers of engaging in the strikes to try to distract attention from the beating death of Brooks. The death at Mid-State occurred on Saturday morning, as members of the National Guard were preparing to conduct a security check in a housing area to make sure all of the prisoners were accounted for, said the prisoners interviewed by The Times, who described the death in unusually graphic detail.