just reid: didn't see this coming.

AlterNet: Graduation 2004: Pomp and Crummy Circumstances
"How did we get to the point as a society where low taxes are more important than providing the opportunity for as many of our children as possible to get a higher education? Where we would rather shut students out of college classrooms than shut down the tax shelters that are costing states billions in revenue each year?"

(...the avg state/federal inmate costs? )

"While economic costs, defined in simple dollar terms, are secondary to human costs, they do illustrate the scale of the criminal justice system. The cost of housing, feeding and caring for the inmate population in the United States is over 40 billion dollars per year. In the State of California alone, the cost of maintaining each inmate in the correctional system is about $26,000 per year. And despite the high expenditures in prison, there remain urgent, unmet needs in the prison system.
To compare prison costs with the cost of educating school children is, to some extent, to compare apples with oranges, because the State must assume the full burden of housing, subsistence, and medical care for prisoners."
SPEECH AT THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION ANNUAL MEETING
An Address by Anthony M. Kennedy
Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the United States
August 9, 2003