Maryland has been enforcing harsher criminal laws, using the claim of a crime wave that does not exist. This crackdown funnels Black children into an incredibly draconian legal system. Now, there is a push to intervene and pass new legislation intended to reduce the number of offenses that will automatically charge children as adults.
ANNAPOLIS, MD—Here in this deep blue state, a coalition of judges, attorneys, youth advocates, civil liberties and racial justice organizations are trying to persuade Maryland lawmakers to amend Draconian legislation that requires prosecutors to charge children as young as 10 in adult criminal court for a wide range of felony offenses.
At issue is Senate Bill 422, which, if passed by Maryland’s General Assembly in this legislative session, would reduce by nearly two-thirds the 33 criminal offenses for which juveniles in Maryland are automatically charged as adults. By comparison, the number in neighboring Virginia, a red state on the electoral map, is only 5, Joshua Rovner, director of youth justice at the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy organization based in Washington D.C., told Black Agenda Report.
Witnesses last week told a Maryland Senate committee that limiting the number of charges to only the most violent felonies—including first- and second-degree murder and rape, manslaughter, carjackings and firearm offenses—would spare Maryland’s children the often debilitating trauma of adult incarceration, and Maryland taxpayers the cost of paying to prosecute youths as adults and the recidivism that accrues from it.
Unsurprisingly, 80 percent of the children charged as adults in Maryland are African Americans even though Blacks account for about a third of the state’s population.
Kara Aanenson, Director of Legislative Policy and Reform for Maryland’s Department of Juvenile Services told the Senate subcommittee:
"The current system negatively impacts detention center operations, delays access to rehabilitative services and disproportionately impacts kids of color. In addition the current system is incredibly costly. DJS spends roughly $17 million annually to accommodate youth charged as adults in juvenile detention facilities.”
Maryland currently charges more children as adults, per capita, than any other state except Alabama—an unreservedly Republican state--and 6 percent of all Maryland prisoners began serving their sentence while still a child, which is twice the national average.
Juvenile justice advocates say that Maryland’s harsh treatment of youths is an extreme example of a nationwide crackdown on juvenile crime that is redolent of the get-tough policies that began in the late 1980s to address a growing crack cocaine epidemic, and peaked in 1994 with the passage of President Clinton’s infamous omnibus crime bill.
But here’s the thing: unlike the 1990s when crime rates did indeed spike, crime rates today are plummeting. A report published in October of 2024 by the Sentencing Project found that youth arrests nationwide declined by 75 percent between 2000 and 2022; in Baltimore, Maryland’s largest city, arrests for offenders younger than 18 declined by nearly half over a five-year-period between 2019 and 2024. Also, while youths between the ages of 10 and 17 account for 8 percent of Baltimore’s population, they only account for 5 percent of all arrests, the smallest proportion since researchers began calculating the figures since 2016.
Moreover, the evidence from stiffening criminal penalties in the 1990s is overwhelming: lowering the age for which youths can be charged as adults does nothing to abate crime, and in fact, there is considerable research to suggest that it increases crime rates, in large measure because youths under adult supervision do not have access to education, counseling or rehabilitative services. Said Rovner:
“We know that children charged in adult court are more likely to offend than those whose cases are resolved in the juvenile system which is much better equipped to handle offenders under the age of 18.”
Rovner and other critics of Maryland’s juvenile justice policies partly attribute the disconnect between the declining juvenile crime rates and the state’s crackdown on youthful offenders at least partly to the news media, generally, and one man specifically: David D. Smith, chair of the Sinclair Broadcast Group which owns Baltimore’s Fox affiliate: WBFF FOX 45.
Smith, who is white, is widely viewed as a Trumpian figure who openly expresses ideas that are insensitive, if not outright racist. After purchasing the local newspaper, the Baltimore Sun, in 2024 he responded to a question about the city’s consumer base by invoking FOX45′s Project Baltimore, a series that is critical of the city’s public schools.
“Let me tell you something I can’t do anything about. I can’t do anything about a person who is a product of the Baltimore City school system. … Can’t do anything about that. As a news organization, you might be able to do something about it by focusing on those people, that class of people, who are products of the Baltimore City school system, who have never had a job. They’re always going to be a product of the government. They’re always going to be on welfare. Always going to be on some structure that the government takes care of. The only way you’re going to fix that is to fix the school system.”
Dayvon Love, director of public policy at Leaders of the Beautiful Struggle, said that Smith is pushing a political agenda in Maryland through his news coverage. As one example, he points to FOX45’s relentless critique of Baltimore’s former State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, whose progressive reputation made her a target of conservatives in the state. Amid a barrage of criticism from the news media, FOX45 in particular, a federal grand jury indicted Mosby in January of 2022 on charges of perjury and mortgage fraud for exploiting a Covid-19 relief fund to buy two South Florida rental properties, causing her to lose her reelection bid to a more conservative African American prosecutor who was endorsed by Smith.
Mosby was later convicted of the federal charges, but in an extraordinary 2021 letter to the Federal Communication Commission, her office accused FOX45 of “blatantly slanted, dishonest, misleading, racist and extremely dangerous” coverage of the State’s Attorney.
The FCC dismissed the complaint, but Love and Rovner say that FOX45’s breathless news coverage of crime in the city set in motion a moral panic that encouraged Maryland lawmakers to expand even more the number of juvenile crimes to be kicked up to adult court last year. Maryland’s first African American Governor, Wes Moore, signed the bill into law. Love told Black Agenda Report:
“I think what we’re seeing is a racial backlash led by Sinclair (Broadcast Group). Under Smith, Sinclair has become a right-wing organization masquerading as news media.”
Sinclair Broadcasting did not respond to an email from Black Agenda Report seeking comment.
Rovner of the Sentencing Project said in an interview that the 2024 legislation expanding the number of juvenile violations automatically charged in adult court was “a bad bill.” Continuing, he said:
“There is a reason that young people are rarely arrested. It’s because young people rarely commit crimes and when they do it tends to be minor stuff like shoplifting. I cannot for the life of me understand how Maryland’s politicians think that they are making us safer by locking more kids up in the adult system.”
Senate Bill 422 pits Maryland prosecutors– who largely support charging juveniles as adults–and a coalition of judges who don’t. In a letter published last week, Mary Ellen Barbera, the retired former chief justice for the state Supreme Court, urged lawmakers to pass the legislation.
Jon Jeter is a former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, Jon Jeter is the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Dark Days and Bright Nights in Obama's Postracial America. His work can be found on Patreon as well as Black Republic Media.
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