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✚ NOT A PRAYER The national media has, over the past week or so, devoted plenty of ink and pixels to a federal lawsuit filed by Muslim federal prison inmates — including John Walker Lindh, aka the American Taliban — over alleged violations of their religious freedoms. Here in Philly (and, so far, well outside the media spotlight), a similar suit against the City of Philadelphia and its jails is also moving through federal court. At issue: Whether the city violated the First Amendment rights of Muslim inmates at the city’s largest jail, Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility (CFCF), by preventing them from undertaking obligatory prayers. The four plaintiffs, Olaf Sutton, Oba Jackson, Kevin Pickard and Troy Daniels, claim they were prohibited from praying in day rooms and weren’t allowed to return to their cells to pray. And they claim that, even if they could return to their cells, prayer was often impossible, both because there was no room in overcrowded cells and because cells were “filthy,” containing uncovered toilets. The result, their complaint alleged, is “a kind of ‘catch-22’ for Muslims” at CFCF: Skip obligatory prayer or face discipline.The complaint also addressed a lack of access to weekly Friday services, called Jum’ah. Only a portion of Muslim inmates at CFCF may attend in a given week, because of security concerns and, according to the city, a history of violence and attempted murders at Jum’ah. Because there was only one, part-time Muslim chaplain (more volunteers are now being trained, according to court documents), adding services was not an option. City lawyers argue that men were, in fact, able to pray in their cells. As for the limited Jum’ah services, in court documents they pass the blame on to the Muslim community:“Efforts to have
more than one Jum’ah service each week have been thwarted by the lack of volunteers from the Muslim community.” Whether Philly jails must follow the same rules around religious freedom as the federal prison that houses Lindh is among the topics still up for debate. Since a judge last week denied motions for summary judgment from both sides, that could be decided in a trial as soon as next month. —Samantha Melamed
citybeat By Samantha Melamed
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✚ BLOCKING THE BOX Last week, newspaper publishers around Philly received invoices for their annual honor-box license fees from the city License Issuance Unit — and contained within the envelope was something of a rude awakening. The jolt: The fees had gone up by 400 percent, from $10 apiece to $50. Perhaps they shouldn’t have been surprised.After all, the invoice explained, the annual fee was increased by Bill No. 090712 — legislation that passed, with little discussion, back in 2009. It had been introduced by former Councilman Frank DiCicco, then chair of the Committee on Streets and Services. The bill drew support from the Center City District (CCD), which had successfully pushed to “corral” many boxes downtown, and opposition from … no one. CCD chief executive Paul Levy explains, “There was some frustration with the maintenance and cleanliness of the boxes, and L&I didn’t have any resources to survey them. So we said the cost of the permit should cover the cost of enforcement.” L&I spokeswoman Maura Kennedy says licensing fees aren’t revenue-producers; they’re based on administrative costs. (And, she argues, CP should clean up its boxes before questioning the price. “You guys are the top violators,” she says. “There’s whole >>> continued on page 10
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THIS IS A STICK-UP
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³ IF STEALING priority mail labels, scrawling messages on them in Sharpie and sticking them someplace they, legally speaking, shouldn’t be is high art, then Curly is Philly’s Michelangelo. The prolific street artist has tattooed the city with thousands of stickers, each decorated with a trademark squiggle and handwritten non sequitur. One sticker reads: “The job of contemporary art is to infuriate.” If so, Curly (he’d rather not reveal his real name) has succeeded: His stickers are, if nothing else, the bane of cleaning crews all over town. On Friday, though, he’ll give them a reprieve by taking his work indoors for “This Art Is So Street,” a street art show he’s curated, featuring Banksy associate Mr. Brainwash, local artist Yis “NoseGo” Goodwin and others. Will the exhibit, which includes five of his paintings, legitimize his art? Curly shrugs. “It’s art. It’s vandalism. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.” Regardless, his motivation remains: “I’m taking a little bit of public space and changing it because I can.” Of course, “public,” like “art,” is an elastic term. Curly claims a city official recently stopped him, urging him to “stick to the newspaper bins” (though a reporter pointed out that this, too, is not a victimless crime). He’s been ticketed by New York cops, but says Philly police tend to look the other way. Maybe they get that this is just his way of engaging with the city: “I don’t think there’s any better way to get to know a city,” he says, “than to walk around vandalizing it.” —S.M.
³ ACCORDING TO AREA news outlets, Aug. 14 was a hectic night for SEPTA Police. Officers were dealing with a bus accident in Fox Chase and a burglary at a train yard in Wayne Junction, so they didn’t have time to lock up some Center City subway stations for the night — clearing the way for a woman to enter the closed Lombard-South station and fall onto the tracks of the Broad Street Line at 2:19 a.m., suffering electrocution on the third rail and lying there, undisturbed, until she was struck by the first train of the morning three hours later. But the proffered answer (a crazy-busy night!) only raises questions, like: The SEPTA Police Department is the fifth-largest police department in the state — yet its officers were all called away to deal with one reported burglary and one bus crash? And: Hey, aren’t there people working at those SEPTA stations all the time, cleaning the floors and refusing to make change? Couldn’t they lock up in a pinch? In fact, it turns out that the station cleaners used to do just that — right up until July 2008. “In labor negotiations [at that time], we hired additional officers, and with that hiring, the duties for locking down the stations were handed over to the police,” says SEPTA spokeswoman Jerri Williams. “That way they could also patrol the station to make sure that nobody was there before locking up.” That transfer of duties was made even though, as far as Williams knows, there had never been any kind of security breach up to that point related to locking stations — and even though, she notes, “Change is usually made based on an incident or event that comes up that incites the need for change.” However, “Now that we have had this situation, that’s why we’re going to be evaluating the process and looking into contingency plans.” On the bright side, she points out, “that evaluation process comes at a good time,” given that SEPTA just brought on a new police chief, Thomas Nestel. Despite the tragedy, Nestel doesn’t foresee more issues with locking stations in a timely manner: “If one, two, three police to go an emergency, there are plenty of police available to backfill. You don’t take your whole department to respond to one call.” Still, he says, he’s open to ideas to improve the process. In fact, he’s been riding the rails for the past few weeks, soliciting feedback from riders. So far, though, he hasn’t heard much in the way of criticism: “People either said the transit police are doing a great job or they thanked me for my service and told me to be careful. I got feedback that people are concerned for the police and for our safety.”
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