Fore example:

Correction officers’ unions are powerful forces in states like California and New York; they push for the construction of more prisons and for longer sentences for criminals (so that there are more people for correction officers to guard). Their activities in California are a case in point. In the last eight years they have spent $10 million on state politics — either in direct contributions to politicians or in spending on ballot initiatives relating to crime and punishment. They have mounted full-scale political campaigns. For instance, the California corrections union has attacked public officials, such as the Los Angeles district attorney, who supported an alternative to the union-favored “three-strikes law.” Indeed, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in February of this year noted that “the three-strikes law sponsor is the correctional officers’ union and that is sick!” In 1999 the union even successfully opposed a proposal to permit the California attorney general to prosecute brutality in prisons.

http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/432...

I would recommend reading Cevin Soling's "Why Public Schools Must be Abolished" for the opposite viewpoint:

While it is possible for a North Korean POW to learn calculus under duress from their prison guard, it is reasonable to assume they will: A) associate math with incarceration; B) despise the inmates who learn for appearing readily complicit with their captors; and C. try to forget the information the moment they are free.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2012/02/27/w...

// for the truly weird look at the Cotton Lobby's effect on mj laws

(21 USC 841)

Opium poppies are also listed by name, but while you can grow them in your flower garden (but putting one in a vase on your dining table is a crime!), you can't even grow cannabis.

Imagine if you had spent 6 hours a day 5 days a week for 12 years being forced to play sports. If the idea provokes violent horror in you you now have some idea how the people you would be forcing to stay in school would feel about it. And make no mistake; compulsory attendance at allegedly educational institutions is forced. Whether the superior outcomes for those thus compelled outweighs the poorer outcomes and massively less pleasant experience of those forced to share classrooms and teacher attention with sullen youth there under pain of imprisonment is aquestion to be dealt with in ones own head.

That said, I don't think raising the required education age is the right move either. In a perfect world, we would concentrate on improving the quality of education instead, both imparting more knowledge in the time people are at school and getting them to like school more. However, I do not have the slightest clue of how to accomplish this.