Prisons are a dark corner of American politics where everyone's uninformed preferences produced a system that's bloated, expensive, inefficient and doesn't meet

Prisons are a dark corner of American politics where everyone's uninformed preferences produced a system that's bloated, expensive, inefficient and doesn't meet its stated goals. California's prisons are a good example: law and order on the right; tax and spend on the left; public sector unions throughout; massive waste, individual and systemic injustice the result.