By Tashi McQueen
AFRO Staff Writer
tmcqueen@afro.com
Maryland Public Defender Natasha Dartigue and Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown released a report March 13 to address the historical roots and drivers of mass incarceration and the racial disparities within it.
The report highlights inequities such as the fact that Black Marylanders make up around 30 percent of the population, but 71 percent of those in the state’s jails and prisons. The report was released as a part of their Maryland Equitable Justice Collaborative (MEJC), which was launched on Oct. 25, 2023.
“The report is more than just the recommendations,” said Brown during a Zoom press conference ahead of the release. “We lay out in excruciating detail the historical context. We lay out best practices that we’ve identified in other states and other jurisdictions. We lay out an implementation plan, or proposed plan, for each of the 18 recommendations.”
Key recommendations from the report include:
- Increasing access to medical and geriatric parole
- Limiting the automatic charging of children as adults
- Ending non-safety-related traffic stops
- Expanding access to Second Look laws that empower judges to reduce or modify sentences
- Conducting a qualitative and quantitative analysis of each step in the criminal legal process to understand the impact of racial and geographic disparities in Maryland’s adult prison population
“This advocates for the enactment of legislation that is aimed at ending non-traffic related, non-safety related traffic stops, such as those that reflect if an individual has one broken tail light or an expired registration,” said Dartigue. “The proposal seeks to change those violations to citations that are treated as secondary offenses.”
Dartigue explained that these kinds of traffic stops disproportionately impact Black drivers.
“The research also indicates that these stops do not significantly enhance road safety, but instead heighten the risk of escalation harm and racial profiling,” she added.
Brown emphasized that although some recommendations require legislative action not all of them do.
“We wanted to be very mindful of that,” said Brown.
In response to concerns about how the 47th president may react to an initiative like this Brown said “These recommendations do not rely on who’s in the White House, and we certainly don’t want to use that as a fabricated obstacle to the progress that we will make in advancing these reform measures.”
Brown said the recommendations are expected to be implemented “sooner rather than later.”
“Recognizing that many of these recommendations may take quite some time to implement,” said Brown. “You’ll see in the report that we do not evaluate the cost of implementing these programs and cost is often offered as a barrier. Many of the recommendations are presented to minimize costs, some might present a greater cost.”
But Brown emphasized that “there are enough recommendations in this report where money should not be an obstacle” for the initiative to be successful regardless of state and federal budget constraints.
Dartigue and Brown argued that these recommendations could save Maryland money.
“We know that re-entry services are considerably less expensive than the cost of incarcerating an individual,” said Brown. “With our recidivism rate in Maryland well above the national average, the investments we make to reduce that rate will certainly benefit not only the individuals and the community, but it’ll be cost-saving to the state.”