Wilbert Rideau, 51, has been imprisoned since 1962 at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, serving a life sentence for murder. During that time, Rideau has gained renown as a journalist, author and advocate of prison reform. In a conversation with TIME Houston bureau chief Richard Woodbury, Rideau gave a scathing critique of the prison system:
Q. What do you think of Clinton's crime package?
A. Public fear is out of control, so he has to put more police on the streets. Boot camps can help, but often they're just another feel-good device for punishing criminals. I'd like to see more efforts aimed at really improving people. Crime is a social problem, and education is the only real deterrent. Look at all of us in prison: we were all truants and dropouts, a failure of the education system. Look at your truancy problem, and you're looking at your future prisoners. Put the money there.
Q. How have the increases in violent crime over the years contributed to a tougher mood in the country?
A. It's a self-fulfilling hypothesis. If you scare people enough and make them believe the world is crumbling around them, at some point they'll start reacting. The news media have helped set the tone of rabid crime, and the politicians just pick up the theme and go with the flow.
Q. What has been the fallout on prisons of this get-tough mood? Is their basic role changing?
A. Since the 1970s, they have increasingly become just giant warehouses where you pack convicts to suffer. Look around me in this place. It's a graveyard, a human wasteland of old men -- most of them just sitting around waiting to die. Of the 5,200 inmates here, 3,800 are lifers or serving sentences so long they will never get out. America has embraced vengeance as its criminal-justice philosophy. People don't want solutions to crime, they only want to feel good. That is what politicians are doing, they're making people feel secure. They offer them a platter of vindictiveness.
Q. You don't feel that the tougher sentences are in any way a restraining influence on the criminal mind?
A. Not at all. The length of a prison sentence has nothing to do with deterring crime. That theory is a crock. I mean, I've lived with criminals for 31 years. I know these guys, and myself. That's not the way it works. When the average guy commits a crime, he's either at the point where he doesn't care what happens to him, or more likely he feels he is going to get away with it. Punishment never factors into the equation. He just goes ahead because he feels he won't get caught.
Q. Then what will stop violent crime?
A. Only one thing: the certainty of apprehension. If a criminal fears that he's going to get caught, he will think twice before he robs or steals. And it won't matter whether the sentence is one year or 100 years.
Q. What would have deterred you?
A. I've thought a lot about that. I know that if I hadn't been able to walk into a pawnshop and buy a handgun as easily as I did, I wouldn't have robbed that bank. That applies to just about everybody in this prison who ever held up anybody. Nobody robs a place with a knife or a can of Mace. I was 19, an eighth-grade dropout. If I'd known that things weren't as helpless as I thought they were, that would have stopped me. I wouldn't have felt so frustrated.