Inmates in New York City’s Rikers Island prison are being offered $6 an hour and personal protective equipment to dig mass graves on Hart Island, a spokesperson for the office of Mayor Bill de Blasio confirmed.

Prisoners have been digging graves on the island in the Long Island Sound for years but the offer of $6 an hour is far above the general prison wage.

The mass graves are not COVID-19 specific, spokesperson Avery Cohen told The Intercept, but morgues and cemeteries have already become overwhelmed as the city’s death toll rose to 1,096 on Tuesday night.

Hart Island had previously been identified as part of a 2008 contingency plan for the city that would see Rikers Island prisoners dig mass graves to bury up to 51,000 bodies in the event of a severe pandemic.

The news comes as Rikers Island's chief physician issued a grim warning Tuesday about the coronavirus pandemic in the prison.

Inmates work on a mass burial on Hart Island in this 2017 drone footage

Hart Island: Rikers Island inmates are being offered $6 an hour to dig a mass grave here

Graves in the New York City-owned public cemetery on Hart Island

According to a memo sent to Rikers Island inmates and seen by The Intercept, the offer only stands for those with a conviction and not those jailed before trial.

The memo didn’t specify what the work on Hart Island would entail but prisoners were told they would be supplied PPE, a routine move for those involved with burials.

The city owns and operates a public cemetery on Hart Island which has long been maintained by Rikers Island prisoners.

In 2008, inmates were burying between 20 and 25 bodies a week there.

Before the coronavirus outbreak hit, New York City already had plans in place for a severe pandemic that would likely produce a need for quick burial of corpses.

The plan, which focused on a pandemic with a mortality rate of 2.1 per cent, involved using inmates to create a mass grave for up to 51,000 people on Hart Island.

Hart Island is home to a public cemetery run by New York City, maintained by inmates

Drone footage showers inmates burying bodies on Hart Island in 2017

According to new research published on coronavirus on Monday, the mortality rate may not be this high.

The study, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal, estimated that the death rate will be 0.66 percent, which is much lower than figures between 2 percent and 3.4 percent that have come out of Wuhan, China.

The plan was drawn up by the city’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner in October 2008 during the administration of then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The report by Charles S. Hirsch, titled ‘Pandemic Influenza Surge Plan For Managing In- and Out-of-Hospital Deaths,’ details response strategies in case of widespread emergencies on the scale of the 1918 Spanish Flu and the 1957 outbreak of Asian Flu.

The report’s estimates hold that most deaths from a pandemic - up to 70 per cent - would occur in hospitals or assisted living centers.

During a pandemic similar to the Spanish Flu, when more than half a million Americans died, the city plans to deploy death professionals like morticians, forensic photographers and medical students to collect the bodies.

It is estimated that they would be asked to remove between 50 and 5,000 cadavers a day.

During a surge in deaths, the plan states that the city would deploy mobile refrigerated storage units at locations around the city.

A hospital worker outside Brooklyn Hospital Center takes a break from loading bodies into a makeshift morgue on the street on Tuesday. A mass grave on Hart Island may be the next step

Patients are coming into ER with sore throats, sore chests, fevers and coughs, expecting to test positive, but test negative whereas others, who come in for other ailments, test positive

This is already happening in New York with FEMA sending in 85 refrigerated trucks for the bodies of those dying from COVID-19.

The city is so overrun with hospital patients due to COVID-19 that there are makeshift morgues being set up in the streets.

The refrigerated trucks are stationed outside the hospitals. Hospital workers have been seen loading them with bodies over the last few days.

Other distressing scenes across the city include the sights of people's bodies being removed the morgues in cardboard coffins.

Hospital workers who staff them all wear hazmat suits.

According to the plan, the city would then need to accelerate the disposing of the bodies, including through cremation.

If the number of corpses reaches overflow, a last resort would have the city send the bodies to Hart Island, the small island in the western Long Island Sound which lies just off the Bronx shoreline.

The city would then have inmates from nearby Rikers Island dig mass graves and bury the corpses.

The plan did note that Hart Island has 'has limited burial space' and 'may not be able to accommodate a large influx of decedents requiring burial'.

It also noted that a 'temporary mass internment method’ could be used which involves placing caskets 10 in a row, head to foot, rather than stacking them on top of each other.

The use of prison labor is a controversial topic with advocates for criminal justice reform objecting to the use of cheap prison labor during a national health crisis.

‘I’m concerned that we are asking the incarcerated to save the public from a health crisis, but won’t give them the dignity of a fair wage,’ State Senator Zellnor Myrie, a first-term Democrat from Brooklyn, told The New York Times.

The $6 an hour offer is well below the city’s minimum wage of $15 an hour but a fortune compared to the general wage offered grave diggers from the prison.

In New York State, inmates are paid an hourly wage of 62 cents. In some cases, they get as little as 10 cents an hour, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.

Myrie wants to raise the minimum wage in state prisons to $3 an hour, but a bill has stalled.

Rikers Island has also had its own coronavirus outbreak to deal with.

As of Tuesday, 167 inmates and 137 staff members have tested positive for coronavirus so far.

Rikers Island's chief physician issued a grim warning Tuesday about the coronavirus pandemic, as he advocated for the release of as many 'vulnerable' inmates from the prison as possible.

Chief Physician Ross MacDonald said the current effects of the virus on jails could bring about 'a crisis of a magnitude no generation living today has ever seen.'

MacDonald was responding to a letter made by district attorneys across the city that was directed toward Mayor de Blasio, asserting he was not considering the public's safety when considering some inmate releases.

'I prefer to do my work anonymously, but in these extraordinary times, I must comment on this letter from the district attorneys of New York': Rikers Island's chief physician Ross McDonald

The New York Times reports that there are 167 inmates and 137 corrections staff that have been confirmed to have COVID-19 at Rikers Island prison, as of Tuesday

'I prefer to do my work anonymously, but in these extraordinary times, I must comment on this letter from the district attorneys of New York,' the doctor said on his Twitter thread, sharing a New York Post article about the letter.

The physician shared that the only portion of the letter he could directly refer to was a part about the prosecutors' 'failure to appreciate the public health disaster unfolding before our eyes,' specifically referring to comments that New York City was 'appropriately managing the health needs of the remaining inmates, in a manner consistent with recent guidance from the CDC for managing COVID-19 in correctional and detention facilities.'

MacDonald said that the jail had been following CDC guidelines 'before they were issued,' and added that the city 'has the best jail health workforce in the nation'.

De Blasio said that as of Sunday, some 650 inmates had been released from jails in the city.

The doctor shared that there are 'close to 200 confirmed cases when just 12 days ago we had our first.'

Cases in New York City hit 43,119 Tuesday with 1,096 deaths.

There are more than 189, cases in the United States and more than 4,000 deaths.