Because $49,000 is More Than $2.50

Pretty airtight argument against the Three Strikes rule and the high rate of incarceration in general in Kristof's editorial today.

The United States incarcerates people at nearly five times the world average. Of those sentenced to state prisons, 82 percent were convicted of nonviolent crimes, according to one study... California spends $216,000 annually on each inmate in the juvenile justice system. In contrast, it spends only $8,000 on each child attending the troubled Oakland public school system, according to the Urban Strategies Council.

I think we can all agree that there are better ways of spending this money (health care? education? bronze statue of The Mayoress?), and that we simply throw a lot of people in jail too easily. Another evidence of our country's under-attention to prevention over temporary cure.