If California emptied its prisons today and sent every inmate to a University of California college it would save $7 billion a year!

That’s one of the stunning statistics presented in the chart below, created by Joseph Staten, an info-graphic researcher with Public Administration (h/t Brian Resnick at the Atlantic.)

In the land of the free, we should be asking why the government invests more in locking up it citizens than in equipping them with the skills to make the most of their liberty and why the country that is only the sixth largest in the world is #1 in the rate of incarceration.