PRISON PREACHER FOR MORE THAN 40 YEARS, BAPTIST MINISTER HAS FOUND HER

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, March 8, 1993                   TAG: 9303060213
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: HERBERT G. McCANN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: CHICAGO                                 LENGTH: Long
PRISON PREACHER FOR MORE THAN 40 YEARS, BAPTIST MINISTER HAS FOUND HER
SHE'S LIKE a grandmother to them. She brings them the word of God, and the promise of redemption, though few of them will be redeemed. Still, in the grim world behind bars, her presence is like a shaft of sunlight. This is the service she has chosen.
The Rev. Consuella York is behind bars on this Saturday, just like nearly every Saturday for the past 41 years. But she's there voluntarily.
After preaching to inmates for more than four decades, she has become as much a fixture at Cook County Jail as the steel bars of the maximum-security section.
A diminutive woman of 69 years, she moves briskly through the sterile halls and smelly underground passages during her weekly visits.
York, a Baptist minister, first came to the jail as a seminary student in 1952 to observe the missionaries working there.
"Very audibly, the Lord spoke into my ear and said, `Suppose one of these were your son. How would you feel?' " said the mother of three.
"At that very moment, this righteous facade dropped and I've been here ever since."
The preacher is as welcome to inmates and the prison staff as any grandmother would be at Christmas. She has overcome the fact that she's a woman in a mostly male institution. Only two have challenged her gender.
"One said he didn't think a woman should preach, and I said I don't think a man should sin," York says.
"The Lord put me in with a group of rejects, so to be rejected is no problem."
She already had dealt with prejudice against female preachers.
York was given her diploma from the Baptist Institute without the endorsement of its dean because of the denomination's tradition against women in the ministry. A rebel classmate made her the assistant pastor of the church he founded. She went on to become pastor of her own church.
Now, as she moves through the jail, located in an ethnic neighborhood on Chicago's West Side, she is greeted with hugs and kisses by correctional officials. With her is Nehemiah Russell, a teacher at a public school for delinquent children.
Russell, called "Hawk," tugs a shopping cart full of candy, nuts, soap, toothpaste and homemade cakes, handing out the supplies as they walk along.
But York says her job is bigger than giving out candy.
"They confess," she says. "I try to get them off by themselves. . . . As a chaplain, I can't divulge what they say."
She became a non-paid chaplain for the jail in 1975 because the superintendent was impressed with her work.
York says that over the years she has seen a change in the character of the jail's inmates. She says they are younger, and appear to be meaner than those of the past.
"The moral status has been thrown down, and right and wrong has been blended together," she says. "So it makes it even more difficult, and yet even more necessary that someone tells them the word of God."
Many inmates are repeat offenders, known by York from both her jail ministry and her frequent visits to Illinois prisons.
One of them is Anthony Miller, now awaiting trial on theft charges, accused of involvement in an automobile chop shop.
Miller, a tall muscular man, asks York to pray for him and tells her he's determined to change his ways.
York remembers him, and tells him jail is an odd place to decide to straighten up. She points out it was only nine months earlier that he was released from the Dixon Correctional Center west of Chicago.
"They are caught by their reputations," she says, looking at the smiling man. "They have to have that car, those leather jackets. They forget what it's like in here when they are after those material things."
She walks on, into a section of the jail housing 87 inmates. The section was built to hold only 40.
A federal court order requires the jail to reduce overcrowding, but court backlogs make it nearly impossible to release inmates in less than two years after they are brought in.
York looks around the crowded section and is greeted warmly. Inmates crowd around while she delivers a short homily admonishing them about their sinful ways. She orders them to their knees as she prays for them, and then leads them in reciting the Lord's Prayer.
York then hands out more candy, cake and toothpaste.
"Isn't that cake good?" she asks. The inmates nod in agreement. "It's homemade, made with real butter. Not the stuff they use in here."
Inmate Dennis Trammell, a convicted car thief being held for failing to report to his probation officer, is a York admirer.
"She never stops going. She works on our behalf," Trammell says. "She reminds you of the grandmother you didn't have.
"On Christmas Eve, she came. Everyone was down, moping around because of where we were. When she came, the cursing stopped. We became a family among ourselves."
York attributes the inmates' acceptance of her to the feelings she has for them.
"I deal with them very crudely sometimes, very harshly sometimes, as a mother all the time," she says.
"I come down on sin very harshly, but when I'm finished I love them, so when they make a change, they are glad."
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by Archana Subramaniam by CNB