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.