There is a price for tough law-and-order policies. The Daily News reports that “state officials estimate Florida’s prisons will swell to 100,000 inmates by year’s end, with about 20 percent serving sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. Each prisoner costs more than $19,000 a year to incarcerate, and at the current pace, Florida will have to build two prisons a year through 2013 to keep up.”
We cut funding for healthcare for the uninsured and children, for the mentally disabled, for college scholarships, etc. Instead we pay for inmates.
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