I was curious to find out what the breakdown of spending per prisoner was in California.  How does California allocate the $49,000 per year that it spends for each prisoner?  Thankfully Mother Jones magazine already did the research back in 2008.

It is clear from this chart that the bulk of the costs of incarceration are staffing (security, administration, parole operations etc…) and overhead (facilities).  The amount that actually goes to supporting the prisoner himself is dwarfed by these other costs.  I think that this chart is a great way of explaining what we mean when we talk about a prison industrial complex to others.  It illustrates the jobs that are associated with this system and all of the different places where people are financially profiting from incarceration.