In Wilbert Rideau's "Why Prisons Don't Work" he states that the prisons do not work in the society because "the vast majority of [prisoners] are consigned to die [there] so politicians can sell the illusion that permanently exiling people to prison will make society safe." To Rideau, the real situation is that prisons do not deter criminals because those people either do not think they will get caught or they do not care if they will get caught. Prisoners are kept in the prisons for too long that they tend to embrace the criminal culture and develop their wrong values and beliefs there. Also prisons keep the criminals, mostly young men, in there for too long, and long pass the necessity. Finally, Prisoners leave prisons no better than when they enters because there is not enough rehabilitation to change them. Rideau believes that as a community it is more effective to work to prevent criminal acts in the first place than getting tough on crime and violence. Wilbert Rideau is correct that the prisons have a minimal impact on crime because first, the prison system cannot prevent the criminal act in the first place in our society and they do not have enough impact after crime either; second, prisons are not doing enough rehabilitation, and finally, Prisons become a place that politicians avoiding the real social issues.
I agree with Wilbert Rideau's argument that prisons have minimal impact on preventing crime. According to Rideau: "The idea of punishing the few to deter the many is counterfeit because potential criminals either think they're not going to get caught or they're so emotionally desperate or psychologically distressed that they don't care about the consequences of their actions." Most of the criminals are "unskilled, impulsive and uneducated misfits, mostly black, who had done dumb impulsive things – failures, rejects from the large society".
