At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen highlights the following passage from Peter Moskos's Cop in the Hood: My Year Spent Policing Baltimore's Eastern District:
An innovative analysis by Eric Cadora highlights "million-dollar blocks"--individual city blocks where more than one million dollars per block per year are spent to incarcerate individuals from that block. Some blocks cost over five million dollars per year.... A million dollars, coincidentally, is roughly what it would cost to pay for one patrol officer, twenty-four hours a day, every day for one year.
I suspect someone could produce an equally alarming study of million-dollar blocks in the context of K-12 public schooling. The raw per-pupil spending figures in several major cities with troubled school districts--$13,446 in D.C., $14,961 in N.Y.C., $21,295 in Newark, to name a few--are already stunning enough.
