Apartheid. USA 1988

March 1, 1987:

‘Prisons are probably the most serious problem we have, outside the budget,’ said State Senator J E Brown from Texas. I compare it with a dam used to control flooding. The downstream folks are protected, but then, through development, more water is coming in upstream and overflowing the dam and flooding the people downstream.’ ‘One thousand new inmates a week jam too few cells,’

[p. 39]

read the full-page headline in the Review of the Week Section of the New York Times. The desperate overcrowding in Texas's prisons, outstripping the 30 percent increase in their capacity since 1981, has sobering parallels across the nation. American States are in a frenzy of prison construction, at a record cost of 4 billion dollars, but the population of State and Federal prisons has more than doubled in the last decade, to more than 530 000. Another alarming indicator of prison conditions is the rates of homicide and suicide, that remain double those outside prisons. Officials note, too, that prisons have dealt with overcrowding in part by freeing offenders early. Nineteen States reported early releases of 18 617 inmates in 1985. At the end of that year, 11 297 serious offenders were lodged in local jails for lack of room in the prisons of 18 States. Local jails are now considered even more overcrowded and volatile than prisons. Allen F Breed, Board chairman of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency told the Times, ‘You have to remember that 90 percent of the inmates will eventually come back into society. Prisons are becoming criminogenic - you put people in them and they become more criminal. And that will spell problems for society. That degree of hostility and venomous hate will be back on the street.’^59.

The African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest black church in Brooklyn, New York, celebrated its 221st anniversary. A ceremony weaved essays, sermons and hymns on the theme of the experiences of its founders - free blacks, escaped slaves, Indians and whites. Current pastor is the Reverend Fred A Lucas Jr (37), the church's 59th leader and a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Divinity School. He described the 3 800 member church ‘as a black United Nations’, because its parish in Bedford-Stuyvesant is made up of blacks from 19 countries in the Caribbean, Africa and Latin America.

The church's history echoes the fortunes of New York's

59. The New York Times, from a full-page report by Peter Applebome

[p. 40]

blacks since the pre-independence period. The number of blacks in the church increased rapidly beginning in 1810 and relations between blacks and whites grew tense. Black parishioners broke away from the now-extinct parent congregation, when in 1817 a head tax was imposed on them and blacks were told they could sit only in the church balcony, could no longer be ordained and could not come to the altar. Disaffected black workshippers then organized services at each other's homes until 1819 when the congregation, newly named the African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church moved into its own place of worship on High Street in Brooklyn.^60.

60. The New York Times, from a report by Howard W French