An inmate at a New York State prison was pronounced dead on Saturday after being found unresponsive in his cell, state officials said.
The inmate, Jonathan Grant, 61, was found on Saturday morning at the Auburn Correctional Facility in Cayuga County, just west of Syracuse, according to the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision.
Security and medical workers at the prison and a member of the National Guard tried to revive him but were unsuccessful, said Thomas Mailey, a spokesman for the corrections department.
The cause of Mr. Grant’s death is under investigation. He had been unwell, according to two prisoners at Auburn and another person who reviewed information about Mr. Grant’s health. That person said Mr. Grant had had several strokes: At least five were documented, including at least one in the past few weeks. The two prisoners said Mr. Grant had asked for medical help days earlier but had been brushed off.
The corrections department did not respond to questions about Mr. Grant’s health before his death.
Mr. Grant entered custody in 2011 and was serving a sentence of 34 to 40 years for first-degree rape and burglary, Mr. Mailey said.
His death comes amid mounting tension and public scrutiny of the state’s prison system. Corrections officers at dozens of facilities, including Auburn, have continued wildcat strikes for days — without their union’s authorization and in defiance of a judge’s order — to protest what they say are dangerous working conditions, severe staffing shortages and forced overtime. Last week, Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, deployed National Guard soldiers to act as replacement workers.
The strikes, the first widespread work stoppage in New York’s prisons since a 16-day walkout by officers in 1979, are also playing out just weeks after officers at another state prison fatally beat a 43-year-old inmate, Robert Brooks. Ten officers have been criminally charged in connection with the killing, six of them with murder. Some prisoners’ rights advocates have accused the striking officers of trying to distract attention from their colleagues’ role in Mr. Brooks’s death.
Even as the cause of Mr. Grant’s death remains unknown, advocates of prison safety say that the strikes are creating hazardous conditions for inmates and warn that more deaths may occur if the labor dispute is not quickly resolved.
“We are hearing from clients across the state that they are not receiving critical medical care,” said Antony Gemmell, supervising lawyer for the Prisoners’ Rights Project at the Legal Aid Society. “If these strikes continue, I think it’s a question not of if we will see more deaths, but when.”
Likewise, the Correctional Association of New York, the nonprofit designated by state law to provide independent prison oversight, blamed the union for creating the circumstances that led to Mr. Grant’s not receiving medical attention.
“There’s just bound to be medical crises that get missed during this — it happens already,” Jennifer Scaife, the association’s executive director, said. “It’s very scary to just imagine being in that situation and there’s no one there to come to your assistance.”
The correction officers’ union declined to comment on Sunday.
The state has scrambled to quell the labor dispute. Last week, the state corrections commissioner suspended enforcement of parts of a state law that places limits on solitary confinement — a move the Prisoners’ Rights Project calls unlawful and dangerous to inmates. Many corrections officers have said that the law has made their jobs more dangerous and difficult and have called for its repeal.
In a statement on Sunday, the governor’s office called on the striking officers to return to work, saying that they were “jeopardizing the safety of their colleagues, the incarcerated population, and causing undue fear for the residents in the surrounding communities.”
The strike has continued even though a state judge in Erie County issued a temporary restraining order last week requiring striking officers to return to work immediately. He has given the officers until Tuesday to show why the strikes are proper.
At the maximum-security prison where Mr. Grant died, corrections officers had been on strike for several days. Prisoners there told The New York Times on Sunday that National Guard soldiers had stepped in to do security rounds, often accompanied by one corrections officer.
Around 10 p.m. on Friday, the prisoners said, two National Guard members and a corrections officer conducted a security check in the unit to make sure all of the prisoners were accounted for. But one prisoner, Mr. Grant, did not respond, according to a prisoner whose cell is near Mr. Grant’s.
During a 7 a.m. check the next day, Mr. Grant was again unresponsive, the prisoner said. After attempts to revive him failed, Mr. Grant was pronounced dead at 8:32 a.m.