Ryker's 'Culture of Violence'

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/opinion/a-culture-of-violence-at-rikers-island.html?

In this article from the New York Times, an opinion piece, it claims that a complete reform is needed of the prision system. The reform that this article wants is one where adolecents are kept in a separate prison than adults, better officer training, and to make sure violence is no longer allowed. To justify this claim, they use several examples where there was officers abusing the inmates, in particular adolecents. They use statistics and sometimes bring in another person's opinion, such as when they quoted the report as saying the "number of injuries suffered by adolecents is staggering." An instance where they used statistics is when they said that "44 percent of the adolescent male population in costody... had been subjected to the use of force by the correctional staff." Through these, they are trying to appeal to emotion by making you feel for the prisoners. They use high numbers and talk about all the punishment that is done by officers towards inmates, and from the examples they give and what they say, often unfairly. The statistics also appeal to a more reasonable aspect as it feels more direct when you see exact numbers. They also focus on recent years, about 2011 to 2013 in all their statistics, keeping everything recent to make sure it's known that this is relevant today still. However, this appears to only pertain to Ryker's, so is very limited in its value to most areas, unless you consider that this should what the writer wants to happen occurs that the rest of the prisons might follow suit.  Specific examples are not used really, but larger examples, such as saying that "force was routinely used not so much to keep order but for the express purpose of 'inflicting injuries and pain." The main source used by this opinion piece was a report being made about Ryker's by the Justice Department. This is a very valueable source, but it feels like there should be some other source, perhaps an interview with one of the people to really solidify their claim that there should be a complete reform allowing no more violence. While I personally agree with most of this, before I could completely get behind the complete reform I would need to see some more proof, and see how much force was actually used to keep someone in check. Perhaps some rules restricting violence, not prohibiting, and better trained officers could reduce the violence. Also, the claim that adolecents should be separated from adults' prisons didn't really have any proof behind it in this article. I do support that, but through other sources I've seen, so perhaps bringing those in, or if the report made mention of proof, mentioning that. Basically, this is a very reliable opinion piece with well-backed up proof, although it could have more pertaining to some of its claims. Lastly, as the piece is from the New York Times, it can be considered quite reliable due to their status as a reliable newspaper.