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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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