Amid a spike in COVID-19 cases, Texas’ El Paso County is paying prison inmates $2 an hour to move the bodies of deceased victims of the disease. While prison labor is a common practice across the U.S., the reliance on inmates to handle the task of moving the corpses of COVID-19 victims is raising questions about the ethics of such work.
El Paso County has about 34,000 active COVID-19 cases, with more than 1,100 people in hospitals, according to local health data. Since the pandemic began spreading widely in March, the county has recorded 769 deaths due to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
To be sure, prison labor isn’t unusual — prisons rely on inmates to perform jobs for little or no pay — but the context of relying on inmates to perform risky work sparked concerns about their treatment during a surge in COVID-19 cases in Texas.
“They’ve been doing this tough work since Monday, before El Paso increased to 10 mobile morgues. I cry for El Paso,” wrote Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, a policy think tank, on Twitter.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/el-paso-covid-body-transport-county-inmates-2-dollars-per-hour/