Rikers Island prisoners offered $6 per hour, protective gear to dig mass graves amid coronavirus pandemic: Report
New York City is offering Rikers Island inmates $6 per hour and personal protective equipment (PPE) if they agree to help dig mass graves on Hart Island, sources have claimed.
But the general arrangement, which includes a wage considered to be a fortune per prison labor standards, is not "COVID-specific," according to Avery Cohen, a spokesperson for the office of Mayor Bill de Blasio, who said prisoners have been digging graves on Hart Island for decades.
According to a report by The Intercept, the offer is only being made to convicted felons and does not extend to those remanded in custody before a trial.
A source who reviewed a related memo sent to prisoners said it does not specify what the work on Hart Island would entail. However, the reference to PPE makes things a lot clearer.
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This comes as New York City continues to be the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in America. According to the live-tracking dashboard set up by John Hopkins University, the city has recorded nearly 76,000 confirmed cases and 1,714 deaths as of April 1 morning.
Hart Island has a public cemetery that has long been maintained by prison labor. A report put together by the NYC Office of Chief Medical Examiner in 2008 identified the island as a potential resting place for a surge of bodies in the event of a pandemic.
But the report also noted that the island “has limited burial space" and “may not be able to accommodate a large influx of decedents requiring burial." The response plan was designed to accommodate a pandemic with deaths estimated between 50,000 and 200,000 and a mortality rate of 2 percent in which 25 to 35 percent of the population was infected.
The 2008 plan also proposed enforcing the Department of Defense’s “temporary mass internment method,” in which 10 caskets are placed in a row head to foot and not stacked on top of each other. The report also found that in 2008, Rikers inmates were burying roughly 20 to 25 bodies per week at Hart Island, which is located off City Island in the Bronx.
Having said that, digging mass graves at Hart Island while wearing PPE may actually be safer for prisoners when compared to the overcrowded cesspool of coronavirus infections within Rikers. Cohen said prisoners who are involved in burials are regularly provided with protective gear.
In a conversation with The Intercept, Justine Olderman, executive director of public defender organization Bronx Defenders, described the squalid conditions at Rikers. “You have a situation where all the protocols that are coming out of the Centers for Disease Control cannot be enacted: There are broken sinks, there’s no hand sanitizer, people don’t have access to soap, and at a time we’re all being asked to do social distancing, you have an environment where people are sleeping 100 to a room," Olderman said.
According to data compiled by the Legal Aid Society, state officials have terribly failed at responding to the pandemic at the jail. Rikers currently houses around 4,600 inmates and has an infection rate of 3.6 percent.
Andrew Cuomo, the Governor of New York, recently announced he would employ state prisoners to manufacture hand sanitizer. However, it later emerged that the inmates are only bottling and labeling sanitizers made by an outside vendor.