Prison money

Did you know that they average salary of a person living in California is $42,548(2009) while the average cost of housing an inmate is $45,000 a year? There is something wrong with this picture. The circulating number of adult inmates in the system is 163,799! That is not including the juvenile system numbers. How can we spend so much on inmates when whole families on the outside live on less then that in some cases. How can our government think this is an efficient system when we are spending so much on it, and in cases having to cut from more important programs just to keep up with those costs? When a large percentage of our money is used to keep a small percentage of our population"in line" there is something terribly wrong going on. There must be better ways of running prisons, maybe setting up a system that doesn't continue the bad behavior but instead when imprisoned using that time to better the citizens jailed! Installing programs that in the long run can save money by not continually have readmitted inmates continually using our revenue. Our system needs to stop focusing on the correction and put more emphasis on the rehabilitation.