What Civil Service Title Does Imam Fall Under?

“Some” (read: the New York Sun) are questioning how much New York spends on clergy for its city jails:

The case of New York’s embattled jailhouse imam, Umar Abdul-Jalil, is causing some to call into question the existence and size of the city’s prison chaplain program, which costs taxpayers more than $1 million a year.

As top city officials decide whether to fire Abdul-Jalil for his remarks to a conference of Muslim students last year, the case has raised questions about the city’s use of taxpayer funds to provide chaplains for inmates in municipal jails. The city’s Department of Correction employs 21 full-time and 19 part-time chaplains from the Muslim, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish faiths.

Critics have suggested that the city’s employment of clergy is a misuse of taxpayer dollars when other major municipalities, including Los Angeles and Chicago, rely on volunteer chaplains to serve their inmates. The city, which has employed clergy in its jails for decades, says a volunteer-based program would not work for the around-the-clock needs of its jail system.

. . .

At a conference in April 2005, Abdul-Jalil said the “greatest terrorists in the world occupy the White House” and urged Muslims in America to “stop letting the Zionists of the media dictate what Islam is to us.” The imam also said that Muslims were tortured in a city jail.

. . .

In Los Angeles County, which at 21,000 inmates has the nation’s largest municipal prison system, chaplains provide ministerial services entirely on a volunteer basis, a spokesman for the Sheriff’s Department, Steve Whitmore, said. The same is true for about 9,000 inmates in Cook County, Ill., which serves Chicago.

New York City, meanwhile, allocates $879,395 a year to pay the salaries of its 21 full-time chaplains, according to the mayor’s preliminary budget. That does not include the costs of benefits such as health care or pensions, nor the compensation for part-time chaplains and administrators such as Abdul-Jalil, who made $76,602 as the department’s director of ministerial services.