On 4/2/20, Carl Jarvis <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Down through the ages there has been one characteristic that has never
wavered or changed in the slightest. Cruelty.
Carl Jarvis
On 4/2/20, miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Rikers Island Prisoners Being Offered PPE and $6 an Hour to Dig Mass
Graves
By Ryan Grim, The Intercept
02 April 20
New York City is offering prisoners at Rikers Island jail $6 per hour - a
fortune by prison labor standards - and personal protective equipment if
they agree to help dig mass graves on Hart Island, according to sources
with
knowledge of the offer. Avery Cohen, a spokesperson for the office of
Mayor
Bill de Blasio confirmed the general arrangement, but said that it was
not
"Covid-specific," noting that prisoners have been digging graves on Hart
Island for years.
The offer is only being made to those with convictions, not those jailed
before trial, as is generally the case. A memo sent to prisoners,
according
to a source who reviewed it, does not specify what the work on Hart
Island
will be, but the reference to PPE leaves little doubt. The offer comes as
New York City continues to be the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic
in
the United States, with 38,000 people infected and more than 914 dead so
far. New York City owns and operates a public cemetery on Hart Island,
which
has long been maintained by prison labor. The island was identified as a
potential resting place for a surge of bodies in the event of a pandemic
by
a 2008 report put together by the NYC Office of Chief Medical Examiner.
Hart Island, though, "has limited burial space," the report noted, and
"may
not be able to accommodate a large influx of decedents requiring burial,"
which the preparedness plan estimated at between 50,000 and 200,000 in a
pandemic with a mortality rate of 2 percent in which 25 to 35 percent of
the
population is infected.
The city document proposed employing the Department of Defense's
"temporary
mass internment method," which places caskets 10 in a row, head to foot,
so
as not to stack them on top of each other. Hart Island is located off
City
Island in the Bronx. In 2008, Rikers prisoners were burying roughly 20 to
25
bodies per week there, the report found.
Prisoners may be safer in the fresh air of Hart Island, digging mass
graves
while wearing PPE, than sitting back in the unfolding human rights
catastrophe that is Rikers, an overcrowded cesspool that has become
widely
infected with coronavirus. Prisoners who are involved in burials are
routinely provided with PPE, Cohen said.
Justine Olderman, executive director of Bronx Defenders, a public
defender
organization, recently described the conditions at Rikers to The
Intercept:
"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."
City and state officials have badly mishandled the response to the
pandemic
at the jail, which houses roughly 4,600 people and has an infection rate
of
3.6 percent, according to data compiled by the Legal Aid Society.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently said he would put state prisoners to
work making hand sanitizer, though it was later reported that they are
bottling and labeling hand sanitizer made by an outside vendor, not
making
it themselves.
