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Locked Up: A Rhetorical Analysis of When Prisoners Protest

By KHYMM FLANDERS

This essay, When Prisoners Protest, was written by Wilbert Rideau on July 16, 2013
in The New York Times. Rideau is a journalist and author of the memoir In the Place of Justice: A Story of
Punishment and Deliverance who served 44 years in prison, mostly at the Louisiana State
Penitentiary. He is arguing for more prisoner rights and to have the use of solitary confinement changed
to be more humane. He references that on July 8, some 30,000 inmates in the custody of the California
Department of Corrections went on a hunger strike to demand improvements in prison conditions. Their
biggest complaint, states Rideau, is the runaway use of solitary confinement, and the fact that
thousands of prisoners are consigned to this cruelty indefinitely, some for decades.

Rideau feels that prisoners will usually not protest because they have a lot to lose, but when
things do get so bad, they feel compelled to protest. Rideau knows all too well about solitary
confinement having spent 12 years of his 44 years in prison, in some type of solitary cell. He says you
live entirely in your head that you not only talk to yourself that you answer yourself. Some inmates,
Rideau reports, have been in solitary for as many as 40 years are a rallying point for fellow inmates. If
only officials would listen to inmates, says Rideau, they would actually understand that protests are
because of what the inmates believe as an abuse of power. Rideau asserts that if they listened they
would see the demands are reasonable: to not do away with solitary all together but to make prison
more productive through education and rehabilitation. Some inmates need to be isolated for security,
Rideau reports that the California protestors acknowledge this and are not asking for a total end to
solitary but that it be given acceptable limits about who gets locked up and for how long they
stay. Rideau gives examples of Louisiana and askes for wardens to talk.

Rideaus essay appeals to pathos, logos and ethos helping his audience of law makers, law
enforcement personnel, prison officials and concerned citizens see that changes are needed in prisons.
Rideau shows that he appeals to the audiences emotions by showing his experience. While there have
been very positive changes in Louisiana State Penitentiary, an appeal to logos, not all states have made
the same changes and prisoners are still at the mercy of officials as his ethos shows.

Rideau appeals to pathos by showing his audience the cruel treatment prisoners receive. He
does knows something about solitary confinement having spent a total of 12 years in various solitary
confinements cells. Rideau says isolating a human being for years in a barren cell the size of a bathroom
is the cruelest thing you can do to a person.

Rideau make another pathos appeal when he asks why should you be concerned about the
inhumane conditions of solitary confinement for prolonged periods of time? He references again from
the California prison, Pelican Bay, that every year men from Supermax are being released into your
neighborhoods to live and work next to you and your loved ones. He feels that to deprive someone of
all human contact will cause a person to lose the feeling of being connected to the world. Rideau says
that you begin to lose the ability to even make small talk with the guards that shove your meal through
the slot in the door. Rideau remembers that for him to ward off the madness, he had to give his mind
something to do so he counted the 358 rivets hat held his steel cell together, again and again and again.
Rideau make an appeal to both pathos and logos when he says that the protests are done by
men made desperate by the lack of options to address their grievances, at the heart of this problem is
the lack of open communication and the freedom to express it.
Rideau uses an appeal to logos when the protestors feel that while inmates are in solitary they
should be given the opportunity to receive programs such as education and rehabilitation. Rideau
implies that inmates need to learn something positive so they can be productive members of society
and not re-offend. If all they know is crime that is all they will do.

Rideau feels that this is a matter that is easily resolved; put a system in place so that prison
officials and inmates can meet regularly to discuss their problems without fear of reprisal. Too bad the
prison officials see this as surrendering their authority. He believes that if authorities dont understand
why thousands of inmates that are not directly affected by solitary confinement would join such
protests, putting themselves at great risk, have only themselves to blame. Authorities are victims of
their own censorship.

Rideau knows this has worked extremely well in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, for decades
the warden and sub-warden have meet with inmate leaders to discuss problems regularly. He says that
this prison has gone from one of the bloodiest to one of the safest maximum security prisons in this
country. This is logos because most humans should understand logically why inmates need to be treated

better. That just because they are convicted of a crime doesnt mean they need to be treated less than
human. As stated previously, there are some inmates that need to have that higher level of security, but
make that time productive for them.

Rideaus ethos can pull from each side of a debate. On one hand you have his time in prison, 44
years for manslaughter, 12 of them spent in solitary confinement of one kind or another, he knows
firsthand about what this can do to a person. If a person needs to keep their mind busy to maintain
sanity, why not give them something productive to keep their mind busy.

The other side of this ethos is that some people will not want to listen to him because he is a
former inmate and some people may feel he had it coming and that he is always going to be a criminal.
This could be ineffective in that some people will not read past the beginning, that he was an inmate, to
understand that this problem affects everyone in a community, not just the inmates.
Overall, Rideaus ethos is effective in bringing this problem to the public, out of the prison
population. Most people that have never been to prison would not know about this problem, but now
they do, and with knowledge comes power, power to make changes.
I feel that this problem is far from being resolved. That there are so many prisons that treat
inmates like a number not a person, they did commit a crime to get themselves in prison, but they are
still a human being and that appeals to ethos. I hope that more prisons will model after the Louisiana
State Penitentiary. I also hope that prisons start to offer more mental health and rehabilitative services
to address the behaviors that get most of these men and women in prison.

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