An article from The New York Times, "When Prisoners Protest" is

formatted in a way relative to how a news reporter would cover a front page
story on CNN. It was written and published in July of 2013 by Wilbert Rideau
who was serving a nearly 44 year sentence for manslaughter. Wilbert
descriptively portrays the reason behind the California Department of
Corrections hunger strike.
The author comments on how you do not hear about protest in prisons,
as he paints a picture for the reader on how inhumane and bad the culture is
within a prison. He does this by using phrases like "absolute power, and
abject obedience" to describe how the guards run the prison. Using these
terms makes prisoners, and Wilbert himself, look like the victims of an
authority figure abusing their power. From here he goes on to say that
prisoners do not want any trouble because they will have their privileges
taken away by the big bad guards. He describes the food in a way to make
us believe it is unhealthy and immoral, such as ramen, tuna and stale bread.
So far, in the article, he tries to show us how unethical the life as a prisoner
is, making it ethos.
The middle section of the article is where Wilbert uses logos to appeal
to the numbers crowd. He knows how to pull in a wide range audience to get
the point across. Wilbert points out that 30,000 inmates took part in the
hunger strike, rather than saying the majority of them went on strike; by

putting a number to the prisoners we are able to visualize that many people.
That is roughly how many people fit in a University football stadium.
He then suddenly jumps into pathos tugging on our emotional strings
describing why the hunger strike started. According to Wilbert the prisons
were protesting the inhumane practice of solitary confinement. He describes
just how little a cell is by telling us it's no bigger than a small bathroom. He
writes, "isolating a human being for years in a barren cell the size of a small
bathroom is the cruelest thing you can do to a person". His wording
"cruelest thing you can do to a person" seems ironic. I would think taking
someone's life would be the worst thing you could do to someone and he is
in prison for that very thing. He then goes on to name a few fellow inmates,
in what I see, as a way to help humanize the protest. By giving names we
now look at the protest of California Department of Corrections and associate
names of people. Now it's not just a bunch of criminals, it's Thomas
Silverstein, in the federal prison system, who has been in solitary 30 years,
and Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace, who have been in Louisiana cells
for some 40 years each. Even though these prisoners are in Louisiana, as a
reader, we will now put names and imagine faces while thinking about the
protest.
A clever thing Wilbert does is tell us what an unprecedented scale the
riots in California was and how it involved two thirds of the prisoners. Then
he very casually says only 2,500 inmates were still refusing food after a

week. It's a very short paragraph and tucked away right in the middle where
you will forget all about it after finishing the article. 2,500 is a lot of people
but nowhere as much as the 30,000 he started the article with. Although this
area of the article is very much logos, I can't help but put the 2,500 into a
percentage, which is only 8%.
The last part of the article talks about a way that the prisoners and
authority figures could work together. I think he does a profound job in the
way he approaches his arguments. If the "authorities" would notice what is
happening, the mistreatment the prisoners face and the lack of options to
address their grievances, there would be great changes, similar to how an
open communication worked in what was the worst prison, Louisiana State
Penitentiary. And by coming together and meeting with inmate leaders to
discuss problems it went from the bloodiest to the safest maximum security
prison.
The last paragraph is where he pulls out all the stops by telling us why
we should care about the inhumane treatment of prisoners. Wilbert points
out that all too often prisoners, like himself, go from solitary confinement to
working, playing, and living among us and our loved ones. These are
prisoners who have had no personal interaction with anyone for years, or
even decades, giving us an emotional worry that these people could be crazy
and unstable.

The whole article is focused on all rhetorical forms: ethos, logos, and
pathos. The article is designed to be put in the hands of political or
influential people with money in the hopes to do away with the mistreatment
of inmates. You can see this by him publishing it not in the Los Angeles
newspaper but the New York Times.