First I agree the cost Michigan pays per prisoner is too high. Texas manages to get by at $13,000 per prisoner Michigan shouldn't need $40,000. But that's for all the expenses to keep them alive (room, board, medical, etc...). So the comparison isn't an accurate one. But let me ask this: Michigan is a state where the average teacher makes $57,958 per year BEFORE benefits ( http://www.teacher-world.com/teacher-salary/…
This line of reasoning has never made any sense to me -- why does everyone blame the public employees and want to take away their (hardly that great when compared to the rest of the country) salary and benefits? The solution isn't to cut them off at the knees; the solution is to raise everyone else up to the same standards.
If you want someone to blame for this, start with the No Child Left Behind act that forces schools to waste their budgets on meaningless standardized testing, and then penalizes them for it when they do poorly, creating a vicious cycle where a failing school can never become successful because it loses more funding each year. Or you could just go back to the root of the problem and blame the robber barons who, through well-paid lobbyists, have convinced the federal government to dismantle itself and its services year after year since 1980 in the name of the free market. We forgot what happens when corporate influence runs unchecked; we're learning again, and we're learning the hard way. The American experiment is dangerously close to failure.