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Pop Quiz: California Spent X Times As Much On Prisoners As It Did On Students?
You've got to wonder how many of these kids in jail would be in college if we'd invested our money in their education. I'm a California taxpayer, and I want my money back.
03.27.12
CORRECTION: Thanks to some intrepid tweet checking from Knight Fellow Martyn Williams, we discovered that the CNN data behind this comparison is incomplete and potentially misleading — it's comparing total prison spending to a subset of higher education spending. Unfortunately, enrollment data is not available for the entire California higher-education system, so we're unable to update our graphic to provide a per-capita comparison. We've amended the headline to indicate our uncertainty.