The US just loves to put people in prison

A nice piece from the P.A.P. blog, which I am sometimes tempted to steal wholesale. There's a general note or two on prisons, and then the kicker:

The prison boom has high costs for all of us. A new prison opens somewhere in the United States every week. Imprisoning a human being in this country costs a minimum of $20,000 a year, far more than tuition at any of our state universities. National spending on prisons and jails was $7 billion in 1980; it is $60 billion today. Several states now spend more on state prisons than state colleges. We literally cannot afford our political addiction to incarceration. More...