prison

At first glance, Massachusetts appears to be a national model for criminal justice reform, boasting both the nation’s lowest incarceration rate and a low crime rate. However, a deeper look at the numbers in US DataLabs reveals a surprising paradox: Massachusetts also has one of the highest rates of life sentences in the country—and leads the nation in the percentage of life sentences without parole. 

Forty dollars isn’t chump change. It’s about three lunches in Boston financial district, or eight pounds of chicken for a family. For a single-person household at the federal poverty line (which represents 10.4 percent of those in Massachusetts), it’s 17 percent of...