Strangely, I was just reading about the costs of prison in California because I read an article about "the grave injustice of mandatory sentencing" [1] and was curious about the associated costs to taxpayers.

I don't feel personally affected by this issue, but I get the sense we are sentencing too many people for too long for non-violent drug offenses.

Anyway, the cost of the prison system in California is about $7.9 billion according to:

https://www.vera.org/publications/the-price-of-prisons-what-...

or (given 39 million people in California) about $200 per taxpayer (no, that's not the best metric).

If the cost per prisoner is going up because we're releasing people from prisons this year, that's probably a good thing.

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/02/politics/mandatory-minimum-sen...