Finding the Racist Roots of Maryland’s Juvenile Justice System

When I began working for Maryland’s Division of Juvenile Providers in January 2023, I already had a deep information of the company’s previous. I had beforehand researched and written about its Civil Battle-era historical past of racially segregated amenities. And I had been a steering committee member of the Maryland Juvenile Justice Coalition within the late Nineteen Nineties, when the guards at three military-style youth boot camps routinely brutalized youngsters of their care. After a multipart investigation within the Baltimore Solar, the state shut down these camps and settled a class-action lawsuit with practically 900 plaintiffs.

This historical past was visceral for me. In spite of everything, the juvenile justice division was nonetheless working two of its previously segregated amenities and one in every of its former boot camps. However early in my tenure as secretary, I started to note how little it was mentioned. At a time when some in Washington, D.C., have been looking for to erase unsettling data from our nation’s previous to create an Ozzie and Harriet — or, reasonably, an Archie Bunker — model of America, new recruits had little concept in regards to the historic violence and segregation. The identical went for many legislators.

Vincent Schiraldi, Maryland’s former secretary of juvenile providers, visited the potter’s discipline the place Black boys from the Home of Reformation have been buried.

Schiraldi clears particles off a headstone on the Cheltenham, Maryland, burial website.

So in July 2024, a few of my colleagues and I started a historic analysis and schooling mission. Led by Marc Schindler, then an assistant secretary and chief of employees with the division, my group and I searched the Maryland State Archives for grand jury and different investigative studies on the Blacks-only and Whites-only amenities. We scoured outdated newspapers for articles about what was as soon as generally known as the Home of Reformation and Instruction for Coloured Kids, however is now the location of Cheltenham Youth Detention Heart. We additionally consulted with Claude Waters, a retired assistant superintendent of the ability and an unofficial departmental historian who had labored at Cheltenham for many years.

What we uncovered close to this facility stunned even us: an overgrown potter’s discipline the place dozens of Black boys who had died within the Home of Reformation from the late 1800s to 1939 have been buried. Among the graves had headstones, however most have been marked by unnamed, deteriorating cinder blocks. The way in which these youngsters have been handled in demise has disturbing implications for current-day practices.

The Maryland juvenile justice system dates again to 1830, when the state adopted what was then a radical coverage of jailing youngsters and adults individually. The purpose was to protect children, who have been typically jailed for minor offenses like vagrancy, from what corrections officers described as “the contaminating influences of evil and corrupt companions” in an 1870 report.

The state’s first juvenile correctional facility — the Home of Refuge — opened its doorways in 1855. However this Baltimore Metropolis jail was just for White boys. It could take the state nearly 20 extra years — and the tip of the Civil Battle — to open the Home of Reformation in Cheltenham for Black boys as younger as 5.

The forest burial website close to what’s now referred to as the Cheltenham Youth Detention Heart.

The 2 youth prisons have been certainly not “separate however equal.” Our analysis revealed that, all through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the White facility obtained extra funding from the state authorities and Baltimore Metropolis, extra optimistic press consideration, and extra programming than the Black one. Even the ability names spoke to completely different attitudes about what these youngsters have been in want of: White youth required “refuge;” Black youth wanted “reformation.”

Whereas the Whites-only facility emphasised schooling, the state’s 1870 report prescribed work for Black “juvenile offenders” who couldn’t “be anticipated to rise superior to the favored race.” To this finish, boys on the Home of Reformation have been leased out to native farmers, typically in merciless situations. “I used to be at Cheltenham [three] years, [five] months, and some days, and I had faculty two afternoons throughout this time,” a former prisoner named William Creasy advised The Baltimore Afro-American newspaper in 1925. “They might rent the boys out with imply individuals who hated coloured individuals, and the boys have been labored identical to slaves.”

The Afro-American adopted the story for years, gathering accounts of wage theft, neglect, beatings and torture by the hands of Cheltenham employees. Within the Nineteen Thirties, the newspaper reported on boys selecting frozen spinach and kale with their naked arms and dealing barefoot within the chilly. Their reporting additionally uncovered situations of hunger, blindness, lashings, beatings with broomsticks, and “toe punishment,” a euphemism for forcing boys to bend over for “six to seven hours, proper hand touching toe and left over his shoulder.”

In a 1939 exposé, Raymond Hobson, one of many only a few Black workers at Cheltenham, advised the Afro that he had been fired from his teacher place for his demeanor. “He has consistently refused to humble himself earlier than officers and the 60 to 70 White instructors,” the paper defined. “He was too common with the boys imprisoned there.”

Hobson additionally described a boy who was “struck within the face with a bunch of keys” and spent 9 months within the hospital. Because the baby healed, he was overwhelmed once more, leading to a four-day nosebleed. The official report, Hobson mentioned, was that he was injured taking part in soccer.

On July 18, 2024, unofficial historian Waters took state youth corrections chief Schindler on a tour of the outdated Cheltenham facility. Crystal Foretia, a Govern for America fellow, and Tyrone Walker, the director of reentry providers for Georgetown College’s Prisons and Justice Initiative, have been additionally there. On the finish of the tour, Waters advised Schindler in regards to the cemetery. They crossed the street and searched a wooded space on the grounds of the Cheltenham Veteran’s Cemetery for over an hour, however have been unable to search out the boys’ gravestones.

Foretia pressed on, discovering references to the misplaced cemetery in paperwork, and acquiring aerial maps and land surveys from the Maryland Historic Belief. A bigger group returned to the grounds on Oct. 31, 2024, and situated the burial website. Over about two hours within the woods, they discovered 4 gravestones and about 80 graves marked with cinder blocks.

Whereas the reason for demise for many of those boys was listed as “pure causes,” one wants solely a cursory understanding of the historical past of youth corrections to doubt such conclusions. In September 1934, former Cheltenham prisoner Harry Brown advised the Afro that he’d helped conduct a few of the burials however knew “of no effort to embalm the our bodies or to inform dad and mom or guardians of the boys’ deaths.”

Maryland’s youth corrections amenities weren’t desegregated till 1961. That’s when Thurgood Marshall and the state’s first Black girl lawyer, Juanita Jackson Mitchell, efficiently litigated a case as much as the state’s excessive courtroom. This was seven years after the Brown v. Board of Training case was determined.

However visiting Maryland’s carceral amenities at this time, you’d hardly discover the authorized finish to segregation. The so-called Free State incarcerates younger individuals in grownup prisons at twice the nationwide common, and, as you may predict, a disproportionate variety of them are Black. These girls and boys make up 33% of the state’s youth inhabitants, however nearly 92% of these charged as adults.

Maryland’s penchant for punishing children as adults is essentially a byproduct of the media-driven youth “superpredator” period of the Nineteen Nineties. Throughout this era, nearly each state within the nation handed legal guidelines making it simpler to take action. For his or her half, Maryland lawmakers added 14 offenses to their checklist of expenses that may routinely ship a toddler into the grownup system. At this time, 33 separate offenses set off these so-called “autowaivers” within the state.

My group publicly revealed the burial floor in July 2025 with Senator Will Smith, chair of Maryland’s Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee. He introduced plans to introduce an autowaiver reform invoice within the subsequent legislative session, which begins in January 2026.

I truly attended this occasion as a former worker. My temporary stint as secretary of Maryland’s juvenile justice system — from January 2023 to June 2025 — was deeply morally difficult. On the time of my resignation, greater than 2/3 of the younger individuals in our amenities have been ready for his or her grownup expenses to work their approach by way of painfully gradual prison courts.

My analysis division knowledgeable me that younger individuals charged as adults have been spending 147 days in our custody, in comparison with 27 days for these tried in juvenile courtroom, the place the method strikes extra shortly. This was significantly disturbing as a result of most of those younger individuals both had their circumstances dismissed or have been returned to the juvenile courts, the place they need to have been tried within the first place. This was one thing I may now not take part in.

The campus of Cheltenham Youth Detention Heart, previously the Home of Reformation and Instruction for Coloured Kids, is lower than a mile away from the gravesite the place Black boys had been buried from the late 1800s to 1939.

A few week earlier than I give up, I realized of 1 such younger man, who I’ll name R. The 17-year-old had been charged with misdemeanor gun possession — the primary offense for which youth in Maryland are prosecuted as adults. Regardless of his developmental incapacity and no prior delinquency, he spent three weeks in an grownup jail, then six months in a juvenile facility. Then his case was dismissed.

R.’s expertise was removed from distinctive: 85% of girls and boys that Maryland routinely sends to the grownup system ultimately have their circumstances dropped or returned to juvenile courtroom.

Quite a few research have discovered that processing children in grownup courts makes them extra more likely to reoffend, and to take action in a violent method. The follow is so poisonous that analysis reveals that youth who’re incarcerated in grownup correctional amenities are at a 33% larger threat for an early demise between the ages of 18 and 39.

Being tried as an grownup can actually kill you.

My group and I returned to the Cheltenham graveyard in September, accompanied by members of Maryland’s Legislative Black Caucus. By then, an investigation by The Washington Submit put the variety of suspected graves to 230. (By comparability, the variety of graves discovered close to Florida’s Dozier College, which impressed the novel and movie “Nickel Boys,” was round 80.)

The caucus members have been clearly moved. They prayed, sang, wept, and held on to at least one one other. Then they pledged to scrub up the uncared for burial floor. “We received’t be capable of convey these lives again,” caucus chair Jheanelle Wilkins advised the Afro, “however we will commemorate [them] and be sure that they’re handled with dignity and use this as a possibility to take motion.”

Members of Maryland’s Legislative Black Caucus handed by way of Cheltenham Veteran’s Cemetery to go to the graves of Black boys imprisoned on the Home of Reformation and Instruction for Coloured Kids.

Again and again in my 45-year profession, I’ve witnessed dehumanization of younger individuals — significantly younger Black and Latino boys — whose liberty pursuits one way or the other appear to be discounted by the authorized system. To me, that is the throughline from final century’s hidden burial floor to our current-day follow of autowaivers. That’s why we should research historical past — not simply to shake our heads and lament the previous, however to ensure we don’t repeat the worst of it.

Vincent Schiraldi is former secretary of the Maryland Division of Juvenile Providers and has run youth providers in Washington, D.C., and probation and corrections in New York Metropolis. He’s presently a visiting fellow on the Pinkerton Basis.