Paying a Price, Long After the Crime

This article starts out by telling the story of a single father with two sons that got rejected from a janitorial position at a high school because of a drug conviction from over 20 years ago. Obviously, a drug conviction, while small compared to homocide or even robbery, is still a serious offense; but does that mean that it must define a man for the rest of his life? That is exactly the case for this offender. However, with the help of the Chicago Tribune, the man did eventually get the job. But that is not the point. Is it just to let a person be defined by a simple mistake that they made some twenty or thirty years earlier, especially if that same person has been clean and a model citizen for that amount of time. In my book, you serve the time and everything is clean. Obviously there are some exceptions to this, but I definitely feel like this man was cheated in the first place and I feel it unjust for his conviction to haunt him for the rest of his life.

Alfred Blumstein and Kiminori Nakamura use many different appeals in this article, but the most effective one is their use of logos. This is because this logistic appeal draws on the readers and emotions and ethics as well. By integrating statistics about how many people are convicted of minor offenses and how those offenses negatively affect their lives in the future, the authors are playing on the readers emotions, as it truly is a saddening fact. Also, they question their readers' ethics, as they describe their ideas on how bad a minor drug offense truly is, and causes people to question their own ethics as to how bad they think a drug offense really is.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/opinion/paying-a-price-long-after-the-crime.html?_r=1&ref=contributors