Certainly there is the dead weight of the prison bureaucracy, a Kafkaesque interleaving of public service boondoggling and private sector lobbying, whose raison d'etre is not the reduction of the prison population but its increase.

BBC: A Point of View: Prisons don't work

In 1811, President Madison secretly dispatched a disgraced Georgia pol and land speculator named George Mathews to secure Florida for the U.S. After a year's boondoggling, Mathews and a force of nine irregulars talked the nine Spanish defenders of the island into ceding it to America, a meaningless swap that neither country recognized.

WSJ: Book Review: Finding Florida