August 1, 1994

From the streets of Brooklyn to new jail yards upstate, from after-school programs in Atlantic City to police training in New Haven, the Federal crime bill could bring hundreds of millions of dollars to the New York region to pay for thousands of new police officers, prisons, prevention and keeping criminal immigrants in jail. Members of Congress from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, and their Governors, are still sorting out the fine print in the sweeping $30 billion bill that House and Senate negotiators settled on this week. They agree that the bill -- which is going back to both houses for expected passage -- would give many benefits to a region especially burdened by crime, though there is uncertainty just how many, or where, or when.

SEEKING ALTERNATIVES TO STRAITJACKETS For decades, the seclusion room and straitjacket have been part of the arsenal that mental hospitals have drawn on to control violence among patients. But state mental health officials began moving last week to reduce the use of physical restraints, a directive that poses several challenges for hospitals like the Bronx Psychiatric Center. Partly in response, the hospital is easing overcrowding and training staff members in ways to catch agitation before it turns to violence. It has also begun to reward patients for good behavior and has started a daily review of any use of seclusion and restraint. A1.

China's Securities Regulatory Commission has ordered a halt to all new share listings in an effort to brake steep drops in the value of issues on the nation's two stock exchanges. The decision, announced late Friday as the markets in Shanghai and Shenzhen were closing at sharply lower levels, barred new listings for the rest of the year and left open the possibility that new listings would be suspended next year, as well.

The seclusion room on Ward 9 at the Bronx Psychiatric Center is intentionally spare: naked pale peach walls; a worn mattress on the terrazzo floor, and a heavy door with a wire-mesh window. It is here that patients have frequently been brought -- sometimes kicking and yelling, other times walking calmly -- after growing violent and endangering other patients or staff members. If patients are determined to hurt themselves -- through scratching, say -- the seclusion room has been passed over for the straitjacket, or camisole, as the state delicately calls it: a cream-colored canvas jacket with sleeves that wrap behind the back, immobilizing the arms.

There were, according to the 1991 Yugoslav census, 18,699 Muslims living in and around this eastern Bosnian mining town. Dead now, or dispersed, they have all gone. Their fate was determined by a Serbian concentration camp that lay concealed in a pine-clad valley about a mile from the city center. A former military depot surrounded by barbed wire, it is called Susica.