By Dayvon Love
The United States continues to incarcerate the largest percentage of its population of any country in the world, and most of those who are incarcerated are Black and Latino. What is even worse is that Maryland has the highest percentage of Black people among its incarcerated population than any state in the country. The normalized violence to the lives of Black people that is carried out by the criminal justice system is evidence of the sociological fact that this society is structured on the system of White supremacy. This system is at war against the humanity of people of African descent.
When the Office of the Public Defender and the Office of the Attorney General launched the Maryland Equitable Justice Collaborative (MEJC) I was skeptical that it could meaningfully bring into fruition its stated goal. In October of 2023, the initiative was launched at Bowie State University with the stated goal of reducing mass incarceration in Maryland. They brought together dozens of stakeholders from advocacy organizations, direct service providers, scholars, law enforcement and other groups to embark on a process that would take the best ideas from this collaborative and make recommendations. These recommendations would have the force of the public defender and the attorney general, and presumably help to push the Legislature to move more aggressively toward policies that would address mass incarceration.
The question that I posed to the public defender in a one-on-one meeting with her shortly after the convening at Bowie was, “What happens if the majority of the members of the collaborative take a position that legislative leadership believes is too radical?” Her answer to me was that the collaborative would have the ultimate say and that the chairs (her and the AG) would go with the will of the group. There was not a detailed structure for how that kind of dilemma would be resolved, but she assured me that I should not worry.
However, the collective, of which my organization is a member, ran into that very dilemma. In fact the issue we discussed was the automatic charging of youth as adults. And this is the issue in which this very dilemma has emerged. In Maryland there are over 30 charges that would require a youth defendant to begin adjudication in the adult system. A defendant can have a hearing that would waive that young person down to the juvenile system, but this results in many young people spending months in the adult prison system. This has a devastating impact on youth who are exposed to the dehumanizing horrors of adult prison. Very few of us would last a day in prison and retain our sanity. Additionally, there are more services and supports in the juvenile system. Furthermore, 60-75 percent of youth end up being waived back down to the juvenile system anyway. Over the past year or so there has been a huge spike in youth being detained and charged as adults. It is my belief, based on what I know about the reality of police and prosecutors overcharging, that many of those young people who are being detained would be better off with an alternative to incarceration.
Given the amplified criminalization of youth in Maryland, due in large part to Sinclair Broadcasting’s racist media coverage, prosecutors and law enforcement are now aggressively advocating for laws that widen the net of incarceration for youth (mostly Black).
There is a base, particularly in the suburban and rural parts of Maryland, that are more prone to endorse policies that they perceive to enact harsh punishment for Black people. This is a base of voters that the law enforcement establishment propagandizes in order to push the Democratic Party to be complicit with mass incarceration. The issue of automatically charging youth as adults is one of those policies that triggers this dynamic and it has resulted in MEJC putting forward a recommendation to limit the automatic charging of youth adults instead of eliminating the practice altogether. It is clear to me that this is the result of political pressure from political leadership that is beholden to that base.
There are some people who may not understand that charging youth as adults does not make anyone more safe. In either case the young person is subject to detention. Additionally, it’s important to remember that these folks have only been charged with a crime–not convicted. The push to automatically charge youth as adults by the law enforcement establishment is framed as an attempt to “hold young people accountable.” This is misleading because again, whether the young person is charged as a juvenile or adult they are being held accountable. What is truly underneath this push is an agenda to make it easier to lock up Black youth so that prosecutors can deliver this result to a base that believes that locking up kids is the best answer to addressing crime.
There is some work to do to explain to the general public that people who advocate for the policy of ending the automatic charging of youth as adults are not saying that there should be no consequences for harm that youth cause. That is what the law enforcement establishment wants people to think about advocates for this policy change. What we are advocating for is that we maximize the opportunity to provide alternatives to incarceration when it is best for the young person, their family and the community. Eliminating the policy of automatically changing youth as adults would help to maximize finding those alternatives without sacrificing the ability to detain a young person when it is necessary.
The major barrier to progressive or even revolutionary change like ending mass incarceration is the reality that there are people for whom the lives of Black people are disposable. The successful, multi-century long propaganda campaign of inherent Black criminality and inferiority has conditioned a significant number of the American electorate to be indifferent to the societal forces, like mass incarceration, that result in the dehumanization of people of African descent. This is an extension of the war against the humanity of Black people. MEJC represents an attempt at liberal reform that assumes that we can achieve revolutionary change without having to engage in political warfare against those forces that perpetuate the practice of rendering Black life disposable. My initial skepticism of MEJC was based on the fact that I know that the attorney general and the public defender are not folks who are at war with the political establishment but are a part of it. While the AG and the public defender have been more progressive than the folks that have held those offices previously on issues of criminal justice reform, I am clear that ultimately they are beholden to many of the forces that have historically been enemies of Black people. My point in raising all of this is not to chastise them, but to demonstrate that there is no pathway to revolutionary political change without political warfare–even if you are the attorney general or the public defender.