Without one reading the essay, "Why Prisoner's Don't Work" the reader maybe filled up with a bunch of question. In the essay "Why Prisons Don't Work  by Wilbert Rideau, the author has sent to the Louisiana State Penitentiary in 1962 to be executed or imprisoned for life. Rideau presents the idea that prisons don't work because people go in and come out the same way, unchanged. Rideau says that authorities think the best solution is to "get tougher  by slowing down on crime and locking away the criminals in prisons, but he had an experience in one of those prisons and knows that the solution wasn't helping. He mentions that people in prisons need to be punished, but also given a chance to change their ways. Rideau argues three functions about prisons: to protect the public, to punishment prisoner and to rehabilitate the offender to stop them committing another crime. Rideau states, "The vast majority of us are consigned to suffer and die here so politicians can sell the illusion that permanently exiling people to prison will make society safe  (187). Rideau tries to tell us that a direct and effortless solution to a crime and violence is to send a convict to the prison only to protect the public. (180). People who commit crimes at a young age, exclusively murders, are very unlikely to work again. It is practical that if an inmate has been incarcerated for a long period of time and has shown evidence of change, the inmate is no longer a threat to the society and therefore should be released. The author concludes the essay with a theorized solution to America's crime problem; suggesting that the only way to lower the crime rate is to attack the problem's cause instead of trying to clean up the problem's effects. Critique: Personally I thought this persuasive essay was very well written and had some real validly behind the idea that prisons in America are affective. I admired the fact that the author himself had come so far from w