What the U.S. spends on imprisonment vs. education

Did you know that the U.S. spends way, way more keeping someone alive in prison is than on educating them?

The GIF below uses data from the Vera Institute of Justice's 2012 "Price of Prisons" report and 2012 U.S. Census data on public school costs. (Several states did not participate in the survey.) You can see that average resourcesannually devoted to prisoners easily outpace resources for students:

"In dozens of states, the cost of imprisoning someone is far more than double or triple the cost of educating a student," writes Mic's Zeeshan Aleem. "Perhaps if more money were spent on creating and sustaining an education system that met all of its students' needs, we wouldn't need to spend so much money on putting people behind bars