Last week, I had the sobering experience of touring previously unacknowledged burial grounds of youth who died in the custody of a segregated, Blacks-only youth facility operated by the state of Maryland more than a century ago in Cheltenham, Maryland — the predecessor of today’s Cheltenham Youth Detention Center.
It was a heartbreaking experience. And while, of course, I offer my prayers for these young people and wish to officially recognize those who have been forgotten for far too long, this needs to be a time for more than prayer, recognition and healing. Now must be a time of action, a time to reform a law that today sends Black youth into our adult prisons, as opposed to juvenile facilities, at rates that are indefensible.
The House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children, as this Blacks-only youth center was originally known, was established by my predecessors in the Maryland General Assembly in 1870, a mere six years after slavery ended in Maryland. It was opened specifically to remove Black youth from Maryland’s adult jails and prisons — four decades after they had passed a law to remove white children from adult incarceration. The House of Reformation, formally opened in 1873, was not desegregated until 1961, through the work of Juanita Jackson Mitchell — Maryland’s first Black woman lawyer — and Thurgood Marshall, seven years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
Segregation was terrible. Secretly burying young people in unmarked graves is unforgivable. But at least the leaders of that day were taking young people out of adult jails and prisons. Today, Maryland sends a higher proportion of our young people into adult prisons than any state except Alabama — 92% of whom are youth of color; 81% are Black. We imprison our young people in adult prisons at twice the average rate of other states. All of this costs Maryland taxpayers tens of millions of dollars annually. And rafts of research have shown that charging young people as adults only makes them more, not less, likely to reoffend, and to reoffend more violently, than similar youth who are retained in the juvenile system.
Costly.
Ineffective.
Bad for public safety.
Racially divisive.
Behind the rest of the country.
That’s what our current “autowaiver” law is delivering. While it is easy to condemn the actions of our forebears, we need to ask ourselves what history will write about our action or inaction. So, in order to heal, in order to improve public safety and make better use of public resources, and in order to reduce our racial divisions, I will reintroduce legislation to reform Maryland’s destructive and costly practice of automatically charging approximately a thousand young people a year as if they were adults.
My bill would allow some of the most serious offenses, like murder, to remain in adult courts, and prosecutors could still move to try other youths as adults if they believe their offenses or their prior records warrant it. But for about three-quarters of youth currently automatically tried as adults, my legislation would require judges to determine what court young people should be tried in and, if incarcerated, whether they should go to prison or juvenile facilities. That important and difficult decision belongs in the hands of judges.
I am also announcing that the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee, which I chair, will be holding briefings at the beginning of our next legislative session on the segregationist history of our state’s juvenile justice system and the grim realities of the previously unacknowledged cemetery to assure that these boys are recognized in death as they should be.
We will do this to heal.
We will do this to remember.
But most importantly, we will do this to finish a job started 150 years ago, finally remedying an injustice that has endured for far too long.
Will Smith is a Democratic state senator from Montgomery County and chair of the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee.
