Schools or Prisons - Where Are Our Priorities?

I recently discovered something that disturbed me greatly. As a society Americans are more concerned with the undesirables of our population than the children that are our future. Let me explain:

Currently, there approximately 2 million inmates in the US prison systems. Most of these inmates are serving sentences for drug trafficking offenses. The remainder of the inmate population has been convicted of weapons offenses, immigration law violations, violent offenses, fraud, property crimes, sex offenses, and other miscellaneous offenses. The average sentence length for inmates in BOP custody is 9.6 years.

The average daily cost per inmate is $64.19. This means that, $23,429 is spent on an inmate annually. The costs incurred by the government include housing, food, clothing, rehabilitative programs (this includes the opportunity for inmates to continue their education), and medical care. I have worked in the field of corrections for ten years and I have seen the way inmates manipulate the system to squeeze every cent that they can out of the government. It is without a doubt blatant abuse of the system. However, prison officials rarely scrutinize these expenditures for fear of the inmate rights groups taking them to court for abusing the inmates in their facilities. So the cycle of spending never ends.

Now the real tragedy follows:

There are approximately 53 million children in the public school system in the US. For far too long these school children have been victims of a terrible crime. On average US public school districts spend $8,287 per student annually. Sadly this number includes all provided materials (i.e. text books, computers, etc). It is no secret that the public school system as whole in the US is broke. The fact that students have had to share text books and sometimes even desks is a disheartening one.