“Mark Twain made famous the adage that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.
“Over the years, piles of reform proposals on an array of issues have been decided by statistical analyses that could be colored dozens of different ways. But when statistics show that in some parts of the city, residents from nearly every other home on some streets are ending up in jail, the need for wholesale change is irrefutable.
“The detailed but powerfully simple report released this month by the Boston Foundation, the Massachusetts Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, and MassINC asks Beacon Hill leaders to examine the failures of current policies from a different angle.”