Is It Worth It to Keep a Prison Running Just One Prisoner?

When the other prisoners were released in 1966, Hess was 72 years old. It cost West German taxpayers about 800,000 Deutschmarks each year to keep the prison running just for him. That would be about 2 million Deutschmarks today after the relatively low inflation that the German government has caused. Some people felt that he was an unrepentant Nazi and deserved to serve his sentence but others thought you can't keep someone in jail just because they hold Nazi views.