Indeed. Spending more per prisoner than per student (even when you divide by three, considering students spend ~8 hours a day at school) strikes me as pretty backward. When you spend money, you're investing it. So Michigan is investing nearly twice as much money per prisoner ((40k / 3) / 7k).

Which is a better investment: keeping bad people out of society /now/, or educating the future generations to keep them from being a bad person? I won't argue that the first one shouldn't happen. But should we really be investing more in the short term than in the long term? Especially when the only benefits in the short term are a society that feels (and might be) safer along with enriched privately run prisons and their employees, and along the long term is a sustainable and expanding economy based on, you know, not imprisoning people.