The numbers really aren't comparable. Prison systems should be much higher per prisoner because the prison has to cover 100% of the living expenses of the prisoner. Housing (electricity, heat, etc), food, clothes, health care, programs, services, and every other expense. Harvard largely does not cover those things without an added expense, and doesn't cover things like Health Care, which would likely be the most expensive cost.
The sticker price at Harvard for a full pay is $64,000, but the discount rate at Harvard is one of the highest of any private college in the country. The discount rate, in private colleges, is the rate at which tuition is discounted for the average student. At private colleges, nationally, the discount rate has been about 50% for about the last 5 years, but for a school like Harvard, it's typically higher, where a small percentage of full-pays or near full-pays (usually, either very high earning families or very high earning foreign families) subsidize the education for a larger percentage of lower-income brilliant students.
High tuition at Harvard sounds some a fucked up system, but this is how it should probably work. The richest of the rich who performed relatively poorly in school (e.g., a 4.0 GPA but they got an A- once in 8th grade, and their parents are in the highest percentile of the top 1%) pay a disproportionately high amount of the tuition, which subsidizes the same education for high-performers who are relatively lower-income. Tuition is that high mostly because they have to pay the salaries and benefits of, quite literally, the most brilliant people in the world.
