California, like a lot of states, is broke. There's not enough money for education, for infrastructure, for transit—you name it, there's not enough money. But when it comes to locking people up, we can always seem to find the money:

Dwayne Kennedy threw a man from a moving car in 1988, but that's not what's keeping him in prison today. It's not the inmate he stabbed 17 years ago either; the state parole board forgave him that. Instead, California prison officials are keeping Kennedy locked up for an extra five years—costing taxpayers roughly $250,000—because guards caught him with a contraband cellphone he says he borrowed to tell his family he had just been granted parole and was coming home. It was "just stupid on my part for even using it," Kennedy told a pair of parole commissioners convened in June 2010 to decide his punishment for breaking prison rules. But "cellphones are just everywhere in prison nowadays.... It's easy to borrow one from a guy," Kennedy said.

We're going to take five more years of this man's life and blow $250,000 of the taxpayers' dollars over a phone call. USA! USA!