How a Muslim Chaplain Spread Extremism to an Inmate Flock explains that our prison system pays to support a Muslim ministry — an often militant Muslim ministry composed of ex-cons:
Imam Umar helped pioneer government-paid Muslim prison ministry in the 1970s, but his earliest experiences behind bars were as a teenage criminal. He says he spent his 15th and 16th birthdays in Illinois jails for purse snatchings and drug crimes. “I went to jail too many times to count,” he says.Wallace Gene Marks, as he was then known, moved to New York in the late 1960s and befriended a group of fledgling militants in Harlem. He and his friends talked “about taking off pigs [police officers] and spreading guns and weapons to people,” he says. They were overheard by two undercover police officers.
He and four others, dubbed the Harlem Five, were tried on conspiracy-to-murder charges in 1971. “We only had my 9mm handgun, another defendant’s 30-30 rifle and some crude hand-made bombs, fashioned with gun powder and nails,” he says. The Harlem Five argued that their talk had been just bravado and beat the conspiracy charges. Wallace Marks, however, was sent to prison for possessing weapons. “If it happened today, I would have been called a terrorist,” he says.
Before beginning his two-year prison term, he visited Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who promised that Allah would protect him. Mr. Marks became a Nation of Islam leader in prison and later changed his name to Wallace 10X. In 1975, shortly after he was released, New York put the 30-year-old parolee on its payroll as one of the state’s first two Muslim chaplains. Some of the other early Muslim chaplains also were ex-convicts. Eventually he moved to the more orthodox Sunni school of Islam and changed his name to Warith Deen Umar. (Warith Deen means “inheritor of the religion”; Umar was an early Muslim leader.)
If “Malcolm X” is a good name, “Wallace 10X” is ten times as good.