Rhetorical Analysis

Alex Conley
The article I will be analyzing is, When Prisoners Protest, by
Wilbert Rideau, a convicted murderer and former convict of the
Louisiana State penitentiary. This article was published in July of 2013.
There had been several prison riots at this time, and the number of
felons in our country was rapidly growing. Many were concerned that
overpopulation of prisons could lead to poor treatment of prisoners.
Maybe they were right to worry.
You could argue that the intended audience is correctional
officers, wardens, people who work at and operate prisons, perhaps
even the Government itself. This article specifically addresses the
issues that prisoners face, so anyone who is not in prison will likely not
care about the article, the average person would most likely think,
they deserve it, they are criminals, and it may be tempting to agree
with them. The intended audience could be regular citizens who are
not in prison; Wilbert could be trying to gain their attention the matter.
You never know, you may end up in prison one day too, there have
been several times in history when people have been arrested for
things they did not do, some of them even killed. Just look at the Salem
witch trials.
This article was published in New York, so we can also infer that it
is intended for a more liberal audience, especially considering that the
liberal population is fighting the death sentence right now, whereas
conservatives want to push the death sentence. I personally think it
should be an option, if a convict faces life in prison and the convict
would rather die, then let him die, but that is for another paper. Given
that this article is also so easily found online, it is clearly intended to
make a greater impact by allowing anyone access to read it, even
some prisoners themselves (they have computers in the more fancy
prisons). If a large group of people come together to do anything, then
the outcome is always good, they will pretty much always get what
they want. The internet makes this easier through web chats and social
media, you can easily contact others now. As is stated in the article,
three-fourths of Californias prison population went on hunger strikes to
rebel. Personally, if I was a warden and my prisoners went on a hunger
strike, I would be like, oh well, I guess itll just be really quiet here, I
mean if they choose to starve themselves to death why should the
warden get in trouble?

I believe the author found his call to write through his own
personal experience. The author thought to himself, I murdered
someone and now Im getting punished for it? What a bunch of bull
crap, and decided to write a bunch of angry stuff in an attempt to
change the world, he wants everyone to hear his voice in a world with
no ears. I dont know if he realizes this, but most things are a lost
cause. A man who starves himself to revolt only makes himself
hungrier, there is no advantage to this. A man who attacks to prove
that he is equal, is a man that has proven his inequality. You pretty
much cant win without 20,000,000 people backing you up, so that is
the purpose of this article, to call attention to an issue that most did
not know existed, and most do not care.
The article is organized as follows; first we begin with some facts
about how prisoners rarely protest because the very few freedoms they
do have will be at risk if they do. Imagine that, taking away freedom
from prisoners? What an insane and unheard of idea. Then, the author
tells us about some 30,000 California inmates that went on strikes due
to the runaway use of solitary confinement. Basically, prisoners who
have been convicted of crimes they most likely did do are angry
because they are in prison for committing crimes. I killed a guy, so
what? I dont deserve to be in prison-every prisoner in California,
apparently. Solitary confinement is obviously not considered cruel and
unusual punishment because it is allowed in our prisons. Each citizen
has certain unalienable rights; I could not be put into solitary
confinement because I have not committed any crimes. However,
when you break the law and violate other peoples constitutional
rights, that is when yours get taken away as well, that is the criminal
justice system. If I kill someone, I know that I have given up my rights
to be free.
The author goes on to describe what solitary confinement is like,
he spent 12 years in solitary confinement. The way the author
describes it, it truly is living hell. This is why I believe that the death
penalty should be optional. The author then urges correctional officers
and wardens alike to listen to the prisoners, they say that their
demands are not that ridiculous or crazy. They just want to be heard,
and be treated fairly (their opinion of fairly, of course). The author tells
us that the Louisiana penitentiary went from being one of the most
violent in America to one of the least when the prisoners were heard by
the prison guards. I love the ending of the article because it is basically
made to scare you, and that makes me laugh. The author says that
many inmates get released directly from solitary confinement into the

real world again. Apparently, a lot of them are crazy by that point and
they may or may not but probably will kill somebody. First of all, if I die
today, I will be at peace, my time comes when my time comes, I fear
no death. Secondly, the statistics prove that most prisoners end up
back in the system or dead with only 35% completely rehabilitating
themselves, so the likelihood of me working with a crazy guy like that
is around 0.0000000008%. Not to mention, my company doesnt hire
ex-convicts. As I am sure you can tell, I disagree with this article, but
that is irrelevant to this essay. I will now discuss the effectiveness of
the article.
I do not believe this article, when prisoners protest to be
effective at convincing me or others that prisoners need more
help/freedoms, however, I am not the intended audience for this
article. This article focuses on solitary confinement more than anything
else, and another word for solitary confinement would be a time-out.
It reminds me of children, they behave badly, get punished, and they
get mad because they are being punished even though they know they
misbehaved. You are in prison, you do not get special treatment or
cuddled by anyone, get over it. You committed a crime, you chose to
do the crime, now you are in prison. Then, you misbehave while in
prison and they throw you in the hole, and you get mad about it? What
did you think, they would reward you?
Logos: This article uses mostly pathos. However it did have a
good amount of factual evidence to cite as well. For example, the
referencing of the numbers of prisoners, i.e. this many prisoners
threw a hissy fit at this time and this many threw a hissy fit at that
time. The author has excellent credibility, I always trust convicted
murderers to tell me when change needs to happen.
Pathos: This article is all pathos. The entire article has this sense
of injustice and entitlement to it; it makes the reader question what is
fair and what isnt. It makes you angry to think that this could happen
to someone, that in America we do this kind of thing. The author wants
you to understand how easily you can lose your sanity in a place like
that. And then you remember that they are convicts. There have been
six or seven cases in history in which a criminal served a long amount
of time in prison for something they did not do. Steven A. Avery would
be one example. However, cases like that do make me mad, but this
isnt about that. This is about solitary confinement, which only happens
to prisoners who misbehave while in prison. If they are not smart
enough to behave and kiss as much ass as possible so you can get out

early, then thats kind of your fault. Overall, I feel like it is probably
effective on those people that preach about how precious life is, but
then they are pro abortion, so A.K.A, the idiots of the world. I dont
mean to sound rude, and if someone could make a better argument for
this, then that would be okay too, but this article does not say that the
correctional officers are wrongly throwing people into solitary
confinement, it just says that they are. So it is quite likely that they are
just in their actions.
Ethos: The author is a convicted murderer and ex-convict who
spent twelve years in solitary confinement. The author is absolutely
qualified to talk about solitary confinement, however will I trust what a
convicted murderer has to say? Probably not. I do trust what he has to
say about solitary confinement, in the sense that he is not just
speculating or he didnt just spend a night in there. He is the most
qualified to describe the experience, but I just have a hard time
trusting an ex-murderers advice about political decisions like this.
Overall, this article does not seem effective to me. I disagree with
what the author has to say, it did not sway me to agreement with the
author, and I do not feel as though solitary confinement is an unjust
punishment. I believe in justice, and if somebody does something
wrong, they deserve punishment. That is what makes sense to me.