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JENNIFER CALFAS

EDITOR IN CHIEF

AARICA MARSH 

and DEREK WOLFE 

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The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4 — Friday, January 30, 2015

T

his past week, my friends and I saw 
the movie “Selma” (now in theaters 
near you!). The movie is based on 

the marches for voting 
rights during the peak of 
the Civil Rights Move-
ment of the 1960s. These 
marches, which spanned 
from Selma to Montgom-
ery, Alabama, were led by the Southern Chris-
tian Leadership Conference and Student 
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and 
ultimately encouraged the passing of the Vot-
ing Rights Act of 1965. The movie is directed 
by Ava DuVernay, the first Black female direc-
tor to be nominated for a Golden Globe Award 
and the first Black woman 
to win the Best Director 
Prize at Sundance Film 
Festival. While the original 
script was written by Paul 
Webb, a British white man, 
a woman of color was wise-
ly chosen to direct the film.

“Selma” is a beautiful 

film with a triumphant mes-
sage: When we organize and 
unite in nonviolent protest, 
we can create a significant 
difference in this country. 
We can work against racial injustice and pre-
vail with new civil rights, such as the Voting 
Rights Act.

Yet with some basic knowledge of Ameri-

can current events, there is also a deeper, 
more jarring message coded throughout the 
film: Selma is now.

I am a white female. I am an ally of the 

movement and cannot claim these struggles 
as my own. But the movement for justice 
among all races — that is everyone’s political 
issue. Silence is violence, and we must learn 
from the evolution of movements that have 
come before us. I write this article because 
“Selma” reminded me that we have not come 
this far just to historicize the Civil Rights 
Movement while we munch on popcorn and 
slurp Coca-Cola (not that popcorn and Coke 
are bad ideas). Rather, we must use it as fuel 
to continue our (painfully) slow but steady 
evolution towards equality.

As I watched the film, I couldn’t help but 

relate so many of the scenes to modern-day 
battles in the fight for equality. Even the most-
brutal of scenes in “Selma” seemed to trig-
ger the thought of some modern struggle. As 
protestors in the movie were gassed, beaten, 
whipped and just generally violently attacked 
by police officers on the road to Montgom-
ery, who wasn’t thinking of Michael Brown 
in Ferguson, Eric Garner in New York and all 
of the people of color publicized in the papers 
recently that have been attacked or killed by 
law enforcement officers? Peaceful protests 
against police brutality in Berkeley, Califor-
nia were met with even more police brutality. 
A man who honked his horn at police officers 
blocking his driveway was beaten and tased.

The current criminal jus-

tice system has been called 
the new Jim Crow. It has 
been compared in many 
logical ways to the systemic 
oppression of slavery. The 
“war against drugs” has 
sent millions into the com-
plex, most of them people of 
color. We continue desper-
ate efforts to dismantle the 
school-to-prison 
pipeline. 

Schools are legally segre-
gating due to income dis-

parities and the increasing wealth gap.

We are still fighting our way from Selma 

to Montgomery. We are still fighting for the 
safety of Black children on the street. We 
speak of the nuances of white privilege and 
the invisible backpack, and this is all very 
important and true. But there is also the 
matter of the visible anvil resting heavily on 
everyone’s back, one that forces us to deal 
with matters of life and death, slavery and 
freedom, imprisonment and justice.

We have come a long way, and that should 

not be denied or forgotten. But many of our 
institutional forms of oppression have sim-
ply taken another form. The fight is not 
over, and while we ponder the real ingre-
dients in the artificially buttered popcorn 
of our dark movie theater, we must also 
ponder the “Selma” of today. Selma is now. 

—Maris Harmon can be reached 

at marhar@umich.edu.

Selma is now

L

ast week brought perhaps 
the holiest day to our cam-
pus, a day of reverence and 

devotion for the 
furry 
friends 

that 
scamper 

around us. Yes, 
Squirrel Appre-
ciation Day had 
arrived, and for 
the 
one 
place 

in 
the 
world 

where the usual 
nuisances 
are 

daily 
acquain-

tances, this day 
was a reminder 
of just how weird campus really 
 is sometimes.

It was a day celebrated on the Uni-

versity’s official Instagram with a 
post by two people in squirrel masks 
hilariously giving random hugs and 
high fives to students on the Diag, 
courtesy of the brilliant people 
behind @umich_squirrels. With an 
official mascot no longer existing in 
the wild in our own state, it seems 
we have turned to some other furred 
quadrupedal creature to suit our 
needs. We’ve replaced one of the most 
ferocious creatures in the wild — the 
wolverine — with another whose big-
gest claim to fame is bringing down 
the NASDAQ Stock Market twice by 
being electrocuted from running on 
power lines.

Then not only do we make enough 

of a spectacle about squirrels that one 
of our librarians has taken 11,000 pic-
tures of them, but we create an official 
school club dedicated to feeding them.

I had tenuous relationships with 

squirrels before coming to college. 
They went to terrorizing lengths to 
gain entrance in the trash cans in our 
garage, to the point where we had to 
trap them in our own yard and release 
them at a park. I once hit too many wif-
fle balls over the fence when I was a kid, 
and knowing I would get grounded, I 

decided to blame it on squirrels steal-
ing all the balls instead. Another time, 
one got trapped in our garage while 
we were gone on vacation and over a 
few days went full X-Men Wolverine 
and clawed a full two inches through 
brick trying to get out. Perhaps the 
strangest was the day I got home from 
school and was met face to face with a 
squirrel just chilling on my living room 
couch — still can’t 
explain that one.

So 
arriving 

on campus and 
watching 
the 

ballooned 
ver-

sions of the crea-
tures that people 
in my neighbor-
hood once killed 
with rat poison 
was perhaps the 
largest culture shock I would experi-
ence. While Ann Arbor is full of col-
lege students subsiding on the ramen 
noodle diet, the most well fed crea-
tures in our city were football-shaped 
rodents with a bushy tail.

It defied all common sense, but so 

have squirrels for the greater course 
of their relationship with humans. 
Back home, squirrel roadkill was 
regular enough that you were bound 
to see one every block, with rotat-
ing animal control trucks coming to 
shovel them up. One would think that 
natural selection would eventually 
cause the demise of squirrels dumb 
enough to dart directly into the path 
of a moving car, but nope, the miracle 
of nature finds a way again.

The squirrels here in Ann Arbor 

escape explanation for all the oppo-
site reasons. During football sea-
son, SBNation writer Spencer Hall 
took his first trip to Ann Arbor to 
cover a game and the first thing he 
tweeted was “First Michigan obser-
vation: BOLD SQUIRRELS.” I had 
a friend from North Carolina visit 
for the first time over the summer, 

and the first thing he did when we 
walked into the Diag was spend 
10 straight minutes running after 
our squirrels trying to catch one. 
 

He failed.

I asked a lot of hard questions. 

How are the squirrels so revered 
here? What did they do to deserve 
it? If God made everything, did he 
really make squirrels too? What 

is 
the 
mean-

ing of squirrel 
life? How can I 
become 
aware 

to 
this 
full-

ness of truth in 
devotion to this 
 

campus wildlife?

I 
grappled 

with questioning 
this 
existential 

reality. I tried 

buying a Michigan Squirrels shirt. 
I even tried to feed one once, but it 
wouldn’t come near me, perhaps 
sensing my apprehension. I looked 
up to the trees and asked them to 
speak of meaning and answers to the 
continual confusion.

It hit me one day. I was walking 

through the Diag, heard a snap and 
looked up once more to the trees. 
Falling from the skies was both a 
large branch and just behind it a 
squirrel. And it hit me. The squirrel 
hit my shoulder, rolled off onto the 
walkway, and scampered away as I 
stood there in awe.

Every day I still walk through 

campus and stare at the squir-
rels, forever in awe that however 
round they may be, they can still 
scurry up and down trees with 
such swiftness. Some things just 
have to be experienced and left 
unexplainable, 
perhaps 
some-

thing even as inconsequential as 
 

our squirrels.

— David Harris can be reached 

at daharr@umich.edu.

DAVID 
HARRIS

On squirrels

“When I walked out of Angola, I 

didn’t realize how permanently the 
experience of solitary would mark 
me,” said Benjamin Sklar, a prison-
er held in solitary confinement for 
29 years.

The isolated torture of one’s 

psyche is not even remotely an 
acceptable or humane punish-
ment, yet it is still used consistently 
behind the walls of our prison sys-
tem. Atul Gawande, a surgeon and 
public health researcher, stated in 
The New Yorker, “Human beings 
are social creatures … to exist as 
a normal human being requires 
interaction with other people.”

During a lecture on the United 

Nations rapporteur on torture, 
Juan Mendez, a visiting law pro-
fessor at American University, 
addressed the duties of assessing 
international and domestic pris-
ons based on guidelines set by the 
UN according to the Universal 
Declaration of Human Rights. He 
encountered friction when trying 
to receive consent to inspect pris-
ons in politically closed countries, 
such as Russia and Korea. However, 
what perhaps is more surprising 
was the refusal of U.S. federal and 
state penitentiary systems to allow 
him to inspect their facilities. With 
only a handful of prisons allowing 
him full access to inspection, the 
UN must refuse to give any official 
reports on prison conditions in a 
given country.

The mandates set by the UN on 

prisoner treatment are a check and 
balance system to hold governments 
accountable, however the duration 
and severity of solitary confinement 
creates widespread disagreement 
on the definition of torture. Benja-
min Wallace-Wells, New York Mag-
azine columnist, presents a piece 
on the government’s use of soli-
tary confinement with the parallel 
effects of brutal torture on inmates. 

The piece in New York Magazine 
translated the events of a peniten-
tiary-wide hunger strike to alleviate 
the harsh conditions of confinement 
in one of California’s highest secu-
rity prisons. The Pelican Bay Secu-
rity Housing inmates are isolated in 
concrete cells for the entirety of the 
day with only one hour to exercise 
in a personal cage outside. Wells’ 
research led him to look more close-
ly into the account of a gang mem-
ber placed at Pelican Bay for serious 
crimes. Although the inmate had 
previously led a life that many peo-
ple would consider dangerous and 
against social norms, he described 
solitary confinement as almost 25 
years of “continuous torture.”

From a historical perspective, 

the Geneva Convention relative to 
the Treatment of Prisoners of War 
demonstrated a framework that 
was drafted and signed by the U.S. 
as well as 95 international govern-
ments. It reflected upon universal 
moral views for the treatment of 
foreign prisoners. In Article 3 of the 
Convention, it is stated that no pris-
oners shall endure “outrages upon 
personal dignity,” as well as Article 
30 which addresses isolation wards 
solely as outlets to protect patient 
prisoners and garner healing rather 
than mental wear.

In countering against the aboli-

tion of solitary confinement, author 
Robert Rogers argues that prisoner 
isolation can help protect younger 
inmates from the influences of 
career criminals. The report exam-
ines the positive effects of keep-
ing extremely volatile prisoners 
away from other inmates, noting 
a decrease in riots as well as a less 
significant presence of prison gangs 
and violence. This also affects the 
young prisoners released from jail; 
once back in society, they could 
be swayed to carry on crimes 
because of their time spent with 
 

career criminals.

In 
reports 
by 
correctional 

researcher Paige Ferguson from 
prisons in Washington state , the 
state facilities used an experimen-
tal program on those same volatile 
inmates with long-term mental 
health counseling. Attention to 
mental health stimulated positive 
effects in prisoners, thus resulting 
in a smaller number of participants 
returning to isolation for behavior-
al correction. Ferguson also points 
to the effects of solitary confine-
ment on society once prisoners 
are released. Without consistent 
socialization, ex-convicts are prone 
to revert back to crime when faced 
with the task of re-assimilating to 
normal society. Programs of exten-
sive mental health aid and counsel-
ing would be increasingly beneficial 
substitutes to the harsh implica-
tions of solitary confinement.

Beyond Ferguson’s findings, I 

feel our country would be able to 
bypass the abusive policies of pris-
oner segregation if there was better 
mediation on what crimes war-
ranted prison time. If perpetrators 
of petty crimes were sentenced to 
more public works and community 
service instead of jail time, it would 
allow for a larger budget for men-
tal health programs within pris-
ons and, at the same time, benefit 
communities with the work of less 
threatening offenders.

While solitary confinement may 

work as a means of prisoner pro-
tection, its overuse has become a 
mentally damaging form of torture 
in the U.S. prison system. Segregat-
ing problematic members of soci-
ety needs to be disassociated as an 
acceptable practice. Instead, the 
correctional facilities should focus 
on improving the mental health and 
well-being of inmates.

Kirk Acharya is an LSA junior.

Ban solitary confinement

Claire Bryan, Regan Detwiler, Devin Eggert, David Harris, Jordyn Kay, 
Aarica Marsh, Victoria Noble, Michael Paul, Allison Raeck, Melissa 

Scholke, Michael Schramm, Matthew Seligman, Linh Vu, 

 Mary Kate Winn, Jenny Wang, Derek Wolfe

EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

MARIS 
HARMON

KIRK ACHARYA | VIEWPOINT

The most well fed 

creatures are football-
shaped rodents with a 

busy tail.

Who wasn’t thinking 

of Michael Brown 
and Eric Garner?

a leftside from this day in 1984

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