2 chambers’ juvenile justice bills diverge
State lawmakers’ motivations, policies vary in approach to juvenile justice laws
Both chambers of Maryland’s General Assembly have scrambled to push out massive juvenile justice bills to quell calls from constituents to address the rise in certain crimes.
And, though they started as identical bills, the legislation drafted by Maryland’s House and Senate have morphed into policies with glaring differences. Bill sponsors Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee Chair Will Smith, a Montgomery County Democrat, and House Judiciary Committee Chair Luke Clippinger, a Baltimore City Democrat, have one month to meld their measures.
But Smith and Clippinger had different motivations behind the bill’s drafting.
“Brooklyn was very hard,” Clippinger said, referring to the July mass shooting that occurred in his district and left two dead and 28 injured.
“There’s no question” that influenced the drafting of the legislation, Clippinger said. But he can also point to instances where children were accused of crimes and sent home, while others returned to the Department of Juvenile Services (DJS) repeatedly.
Juvenile court records are shielded from the public under state law. Clippinger said this is done deliberately and in the hope that minors will receive the services they need.
Clippinger also said he took “some of the lessons learned” from briefings held ahead of the 2024 session and matched them with “some of the broader concerns that were coming from people in the community.”
Smith was more driven by what he called “points of failure in the system,” notably DJS — “which is the largest part of this whole thing,” he said.
Smith said that conversations in the interim demonstrated that recent reforms were “necessary and the right thing to do,” but were more than DJS “was prepared to accept and fully develop.” Services weren’t being provided in a timely manner, there weren’t enough contracted vendors and children were being sent out of state for inpatient substance abuse and mental health treatment.
“So, what do you do? What tools do you have at your disposal?” he asked. “Expanding probation is one of them. Incarcerating kids is not where my mind was going.”
As originally drafted, the legislation would allow judges to extend probationary periods if children have two unexcused absences from their court-mandated treatment programs.
The Senate bill was amended to give judges discretion to not extend probationary periods in spite of those absences if they find the child has substantially completed their program. If probation is extended, judges would receive a progress report if children accrue four additional unexcused absences.
Currently, the maximum amount of probation a child can get for a misdemeanor is six months, which can be extended up to one year. For a felony, the initial sentence is one year with a possible extension of up to two years.
Clippinger said “it was becoming clear” that minors were either unable to enroll in rehabilitation programming, or were “running the clock and not engaging,” at all. He also noted that juvenile court judges don’t have tools to enforce participation.
The legislation also expands the charges that 10- to 12-year-olds can face.
For the House, that includes third-degree sex offenses, animal mutilation and firearms charges.
Car theft is also among the charges. Under the House bill, those children would attend diversion programs on their first offense for a firearm or car theft charge.
The Senate bill also increases the charges for that age group to include third-degree sex offenses and the same firearms offenses as the House bill, but strikes the mutilation of animals.
Children who steal cars — regardless of the number of occurrences — would be subject to Child in Need of Services (CINS) petitions.
According to Clippinger, only six kids in this age group committed car thefts that resulted in complaints in 2022. He said firearms charges that year were similarly low — “definitely less than 100, probably less than 50.”
Senate lawmakers are particularly invested in the CINS process because competency in the courts can be hard to achieve for younger children.
“When I’ve looked at CINS across the country, the use of CINS is a really productive tool in the juvenile services system,” he said. “In Maryland, that has not been the case. We’ve had a much more carceral … corporal, detention-based program, and we have worse outcomes.”
The Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee rejected an amendment offered by Sen. Jill P. Carter, a Baltimore City Democrat, that would have more closely matched the House bill by requiring children aged 10 to 12 facing gun charges to go through the CINS process.
“Firearms are inherently dangerous, and we have a serious health crisis with regard to gun violence in Maryland,” Smith said at a news conference last week. “Sometimes that will necessitate someone being under supervised housing because whatever is happening in the house and because [of ] whatever the individual is doing out in the community. It’s a very, very serious offense, and that’s why we drew that line.”
Clippinger said finding a child in possession of a gun “has to be an all-handson-deck, what-the-hellis-going-on moment” that “justifies putting them in a different category.”
He doesn’t necessarily want them detained either, he clarified.
Several Democratic lawmakers fear that this policy is a step backward from the Juvenile Justice Reform Act of 2022, which limited criminal charges for 10- to 12-year-olds to only crimes deemed violent under Maryland law, such as carjacking, rape and murder.
Policies in the Juvenile Justice Reform Act stemmed from recommendations made by the Juvenile Justice Reform Council, which met for two years to study state and national data and best practices.
Some Democratic lawmakers questioned whether any data was behind the 2024 bill, noting that creating the Juvenile Justice Reform Act was a multiyear endeavor.
Sen. Charles Sydnor, a Baltimore County Democrat who twice voted against the 2024 bill, said the reported numbers of car thefts among 10- to 12-year-olds led him to believe that “the stories that we were hearing were overblown.”
Clippinger said his goal is not to “tear down everything that was passed” in 2022, but to put guardrails on those policies.
Under both bills, children could be held pretrial if they were found delinquent twice over a two-year period, or if they were under DJS supervision and committed an offense that would be punishable by over two years in prison if committed by an adult. The Senate bill provides a carve-out to exempt children from being detained for second-degree assault.
The House bill would allow DJS intake officers to release children to community detention, but would also let them place minors back into an agency facility if they violate the conditions of community detention.
The House bill offers policy changes that weren’t added to the Senate’s legislation, including amendments to codify the recently established Governor’s Office for Children and the Governor’s Office of Crime Prevention and Policy.
Additionally, the House bill would require local boards of education to provide alternative options for children on the juvenile sex offender registry to continue their education away from school grounds and other children.
Smith said that the policy discrepancies will be addressed in a conference committee hearing later this session.
The legislation has detractors on both sides of the aisle, with some Democrats alleging that it goes too far and Republicans arguing on the House and Senate floors that it doesn’t go far enough.
Senate Minority Leader Steve Hershey, an Eastern Shore Republican, said after casting his favorable vote that there are more aggressive crime bills to work on, but they haven’t moved out of committee.
In a statement, Maryland Public Defender Natasha Dartigue said both bills have “problematic provisions.” She singled out Smith’s version, saying that it “disregards best practices” and “triggers the overpolicing of Black children from marginalized communities.”
Yanet Amanuel, the public policy director for the ACLU of Maryland, applauded the six Democrats who voted against the bill’s passage on the House floor.
“When you get to a place where no one’s quite happy, maybe you’ve done the right thing,” Smith said last week.
Their ability to act ends at 12:01 a.m. April 9, when the legislature adjourns for the year. Then the management of youth justice solely falls to Gov. Wes Moore and DJS Secretary Vincent Schiraldi.
House Judiciary Committee Chair Luke Clippinger said finding a child in possession of a gun “has to be an all-hands-on-deck, what-the-hell-isgoing-on moment” that “justifies putting them in a different category.”