4 - The Michigan Daily - Tuesday, January 14, 2003
OP/ED
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
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JON SCHWARTZ
Editor in Chief
JOHANNA HANINK
Editorial Page Editor
Unless otherwise noted, unsigned editorials reflect the opinion of the majority of the Daily's
editorial board. All other articles, letters and cartoons do not
necessarily reflect the opinion of The Michigan Daily.
NOTABLE
QUOTABLE
I don't think
there is any point
putting an arbitrary
timescale on it."
- British Prime Minister Tony Blair
concerning an invasion of Iraq, as reported
in yesterday's International Herald Tribune.
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KARL KRESSBACH UNITED NATIONS
I
It's not all sunshine and 'Shawshank'
JOSEPH LITMAN TiHE LOW END TIEOR
D avid Mamet
wrote, "Every-
body needs
money. That's why they
call it money," in his 2001
film, "Heist." To borrow,
then, from that memo-
rable line, I should like to
remind everyone that no
one wants to go to prison.
That's why they call it prison.
While I wouldn't ever presume to be as tal-
ented a wordsmith as Mr. Mamet, I do feel
obliged to take liberty with his work given the
conflagration started by Illinois' Republican
Gov. George Ryan last Friday when he com-
muted all the sentences of his state's death row
inmates.
The fiery debate concerning capital punish-
ment has been long burning in this nation, rou-
tinely stoked by findings of unjust application
or significant improvements in genetic testing.
Gov. Ryan's decision to spare 167 prisoners,
however, is the most incendiary move in recent
times, and will hopefully facilitate the promul-
gation of significant systemic changes. Yet lost
amidst the heated discussion concerning the
incredible shift in Illinois is that those whose
sentences were commuted were neither exoner-
ated nor spared torture and punishment.
Instead, the population that formerly
dwelled on death row will now be forced to
grapple with the terrible realities presented by
long-term incarceration in America. The Mar-
riage of Figaro will not be blaring from public
address speakers. If anything, Illinois's formerly
condemned should watch HBO's "Oz" to get a
better sense of what the remainder of their time
will be, if they don't know already: Years spent
with angry men who have committed terrible,
often violent crimes and are remanded in an
infantilizing, rigid environment devoid of empa-
thy and lacking rehabilitative power.
Surely, neither "The Shawshank Redemp-
tion" nor "Oz" - both fictional - can be taken
as definitive and accurate portrayals of prison
life. However, books like Ted Conover's New
Jack - in which Conover details his year work-
ing as a corrections officer at New York's Sing
Sing maximum-security facility - are more
reliable accounts of life inside the United States'
criminal repositories. And Conover spares no
detail as he recounts grizzly episodes of verbal
and physical abuse, all reminding readers that
the culture of incarceration rests on the bedrock
of violence, immersed in a sea of abuse and fear.
The war on drugs and its asinine, ineffec-
tive, rigid sentencing guidelines may have
bloated the prison system with non-violent drug
offenders, yet the presence of this unlucky
group of dime-bag-buyers should not obfuscate
that prisons are still populated by those who
have performed terrible acts of murder, rape,
manslaughter, assault and kidnapping. Going to
jail is not a vacation spent with the leisure set,
playing cards and filling copious amounts of
recreation time.
The dissemination of similar misinformation
is rampant, however, among capital punish-
ment's ardent advocates. At the expense of
truth, fervent death penalty proponents have
ignored the bleak and horrific realities of
imprisonment, instead painting time spent in jail
as an unjustly benign consequence of illegality.
To adva ie, their goal, this groqp las edgigpated
state-sanctioned death as the only acceptable
punishment for awful crimes, often invoking the
Hammurabi notion of eye-for-an-eye justice.
These attempts to advance their agenda are
insultingly condescending and simple if not
egregiously naive; a prison sentence may not be
the lesser of the two evils.
I don't callously propose this last conclusion
as a marginalization of life. Gov. Ryan lent cre-
dence to this notion when he mentioned that
some prisoners on death row pleaded that he
uphold their sentences instead of reassigning
them to incarceration for life. There can be no
greater indictment of the penal system than pris-
oners consciously choosing to die rather then
miserably dwell in jail.
This knowledge should suffice for those
indifferent or undecided about the merits of the
death penalty.. However, there are even better
reasons to applaud Ryan. DNA testing has
already exonerated many who were wrongly
convicted - 13 out of 25 reviewed cases in Illi-
nois alone. The increasingly suspect testimony
of eyewitnesses further indicates that many con-
victions may have been unwarranted. As these
flaws in our legal system emerge, objections to
government-led killings grow in both number
and strength. Until more cases are reviewed and
the legal system is further scrutinized, the 37
other states with the death penalty should enact
similar measures to those in Illinois, at least
instituting moratoriums on executions.
Those who object to such measures should
try and remember that only going to prison will
be punishment enough. Andy Dufresne will not
be writing any time soon.
Joseph Litman can. be reached
at litmanj@umich.edu.
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04 1
Yost fans need ThunderStix like pope needs bible
JON SCHWARTZ Two SIDES
TO EVERY SCHWARTZ
s dreported in
Sunday's edi-
tion of The Ann
Arbor News, the Michi-
gan Athletic Depart-
ment will be giving out
ThunderStix for the
Feb. 14 hockey show-
down against Michigan
State. This idea seems
to me remarkably similar to some ambi-
tious groundskeeper at Wrigley Field
removing the famous ivy walls; in my
view, we're talking about a complete
destruction of a venue's character.
Since coming to Michigan, I have
become somewhat fanatical about Michi-
gan sports. And I'll certainly admit that one
of my fondest sports memories of all time
is my first game at Michigan Stadium,
against Notre Dame, squinting from my
92nd-row seat to see whatever I could of a
phenomenal game.
But despite the 107,501-seat monstrosi-
ty's grandeur, nothing in my mind com-
pares to Yost Ice Arena, the old barn on
State Street that has housed some of the
greatest moments in the long history of
Michigan sports. Yost seats about 100,600
fewer fans than the Big House, but what it
lacks in size is made up for with the great-
est sports atmosphere I've ever been a part
of. Though I have never seen a basketball
game at Duke's Cameron Indoor Stadium,
writers far more experienced and notewor-
thy than I have been known to compare the
two jewels positively.
Yost is a treasure. I'll never forget the
Michigan State game there last year, when
Michigan completely outplayed the Spar-
tans for the majority of the game, but
couldn't get onto the scoreboard for the
game's first 53 minutes. When it was done,
Michigan had eked out a 1-1 tie and I was
completely out of breath. I'd never seen
energy like that, never seen fans so clearly
rally a team to success.
Never, that is, until two months later
when, in a repeat of 1998, Michigan's sup-
porters pushed the Wolverines to a huge
upset win in the NCAA Regional and a
berth in the Frozen Four. For the pivotal
matchup against Denver, I was standing in
the back row of the legendary arena, as far
away from the ice as the venue's meager
size allowed, but close enough to be com-
pletely swept away by the tidal wave of
emotion that filled the barn.
That's what Yost is all about - intima-
cy. Sometimes painfully loud intimacy.
Contrast those examples with two
incredible football games in Ann Arbor this
year. In the first, Michigan beat Washing-
ton on a last-second field goal, ironic con-
sidering that at times this season it seemed
like anyone in the student section was a
legitimate to become Michigan's placekick-
er. In another, Michigan needed overtime to
beat Penn State, an unbelievable finish that
sent fans crazy.
Those two games were undoubtedly
great, but even standing on the field at both
contests' conclusions, I was still overcome
by the relative calmness in the atmosphere.
It's no secret that Michigan Stadium is
quiet. Whether it's the architecture or the
fans themselves, there's no secret that "The
House that Yost Built" never goes nearly as
crazy as the one which bears his name.
With all that in mind, it's so hard for me
to accept the fact that I'm going to have to
deal with the artificial - and completely
superfluous - roar of ThunderStix at the
Michigan State game. Why mess with the
best thing going?
ThunderStix were annoying at this
year's World Series. But like it or not, Ana-
heim fans need foolish things like rally
monkeys and noisemakers to get involved
in sports. Likewise, I wouldn't be this
angry if I heard that the maddening mara-
cas were being given out at Crisler Arena
or Michigan Stadium. It would bother me,
but hey, noise is noise, and those two
places need more of it.
But Yost? Giving Yost fans Thunder-
Stix is like offering the pope a bible.
Thanks for the offer, but we've got it under
control.
It's surely too late for the Athletic
Department to call off the promotion (and
don't worry, I'm not so arrogant as to think
that if it wasn't too late, my opinion would
call for an emergency recall!). But it's not
too late for Michigan supporters to show
what makes them the greatest hockey fans
in the world. At the next home game, on
Jan. 31 against Ferris State, the Yost crowd
has a perfect opportunity to make noise the
likes of which can never be artificially
reproduced by the banging together of two
plastic tubes.
I can all but guarantee that the Cameron
Crazies would be offended if offered Thun-
derStix and would laughingly refuse to
accept them. It's not too late for us to do
the same.
S
Jon Schwartz can be reached
atjlsz@umich.edu.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Honkala column trivialized
the intellectual courage of
Christopher Hitchens
TO THE DAILY:
In response to John Honkala's column,
Hitch hits the road; pass the whiskey
(01/10/03) two points: First, Christopher
Hitchens' decision to leave The Nation
came as no surprise to anyone who read
his columns and compared them to the
mess that was the rest of the magazine.
As a liberal, I have a certain respect for
the intellectual and moral honesty
involved in Hitchens' decision. Liberals
should be the first and most vocal in call-
ing for an end to the Hussein regime in
Iraq, and that only as a stepping-stone
towards bringing democracy and pluralism
to Iran, Suadi Arabia and elsewhere. As a
former subscriber to The Nation, I was
always dismayed that those who wrote for
that magazine on foreign policy seemed
more willing to hem and haw over the
ramifications of violence rather than see
the potential to expand liberty across the
world.
Hitchens is right to make common cause
with those who understand that wherever
they come from politically.
Another note I'd like to make: Honkala
correlates the fall of Leftism with the rise
of modern middle-class life right around
the time of Richard Nixon. Well, he got
the timing right, but the reason wrong. The
Left failed because New Leftists strangled
the productive and substantive liberal poli-
cy apparatus of the time, replacing it with
the myopia typified by college demonstra-
tors - the logical point of contrast being
student dissidents in Iran. Much of Leftism
nowadays requires neither inquiring into
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