By Kisha A. Brown
Special to the AFRO
Maryland’s criminal system has long operated like an engine built to run roughshod over Black lives, and the data makes that plain: Black people represent roughly 30 percent of the state’s population but make up about 71 percent of those behind bars. That imbalance is a monument to deep-seated structural policies and practices to cage and cripple the Black community.
In a state that birthed Harriet Tubman and raised Thurgood Marshall, the punishment for pursuing our liberation continues today. In spite of Black leadership at the highest positions we have continued for decades to decimate Black families in the name of criminal justice and seem to think that modest tinkering of the system is sufficient to fix a system.
It’s not.
For example, one of the clearest windows into this injustice is Maryland’s antiquated practice of automatically charging certain youth as adults. It is a relic from the “superpredator” era—an era built on junk “science” and racial propaganda—that continues to shape young people’s lives today. Bills to end this practice failed again in 2025, but there is another chance ahead. Sen. William C. Smith Jr. (D-Montgomery County), chair of the Judicial Proceedings Committee, will reintroduce legislation in the 2026 General Assembly to raise the age at which a child may be automatically thrust into the adult system from 14 to 16. Frankly, it should be 18, because no child—none—belongs in an adult courtroom or an adult cage.
We cannot keep insisting that teenagers are fully formed adults when neuroscience, lived experience, and common sense tell us otherwise. Who are we protecting by throwing Black children into adult prisons?
Black children pay the highest price under the current system. Black children are not more prone to crime; they are more exposed to poverty-induced conditions and rarely benefit from the informal safety nets—those whispered phone calls between White parents and White officers—that quietly redirect White youth away from the criminal legal system. Black children don’t get the “backdoor hookup.” They get the booking room.
The Commission on Juvenile Justice Reform and Emerging and Best Practices has already condemned Maryland’s status quo, reporting that youth spent 90 to 180 days in adult jails before being transferred back to juvenile court. Federal guidelines say youth should never be held in adult facilities for more than six hours except under extraordinary circumstances. Six hours—not six months. What Maryland is doing isn’t just out of step with best practices; it has been and continues to be the rotten underpinnings of this great state.
Repairing Maryland’s criminal system requires courage, clarity and a refusal to accept the normalized harm that has defined policy for too long. Ending automatic adult charges for youth should be a top priority. Anyone in opposition is complicit in the injustice they claim to abhor.
Support leaders who stand up everyday on these issues like Public Defender Natasha Dartigue and Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle.
Call your elected official today- mdelect.net!
No one is coming to save us.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the writer and not necessarily those of the AFRO.