Advocates call on leaders to scrap juvenile justice legislation
Civil rights advocates gathered in Annapolis on Thursday afternoon to call on lawmakers to strip the legislature’s intricate juvenile justice bill of its punitive measures.
“This bill is not backed by evidence-based practices, it does not have the endorsement of a credible commission of experts, and it does not provide the kind of help that kids need and deserve,” Erin Seagears, an assistant public defender for Anne Arundel County, said. “Our kids who need our help, this bill harms them.”
The small coalition of advocates assembled at Lawyers Mall outside of the Maryland State House to ask lawmakers to strike all of the bill’s measures aside from the creation of a commission to study juvenile justice best practices. Should the legislature decline, the bill’s opposition plans to demand that Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, vetoes it.
The Maryland General Assembly is ushering multipronged juvenile justice legislation to the governor’s desk in response to public pressure from police, prosecutor and constituent complaints about a rise in certain crimes among children. Zakiya Sankara-Jabar, the co-founder of Racial Justice NOW!, said Thursday that she is “offended” that the bill passed out of both chambers, and called its policies “completely uncivilized.”
Dayvon Love, the public policy director for Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, a Baltimore-based think tank centered on the policy interests of Black people, said that organizers have been calling on the legislature to provide more support for children “for many years,” and has never seen lawmakers having as many conversations about investing in youth as they are this session.
“I would argue that’s a consequence of the fact that those that are legislating this policy recognize the potential harm that is done by moving in this direction, and recognize that … saying verbally that they’re interested in investing in young people is a way to soften the blow of a policy they know is problematic,” Love said.
A report issued in January by the Maryland Youth Justice Coalition demonstrated a downward trend in youth crime across the board.
However, car thefts, carjackings and firearms offenses have spiked among Maryland children from fiscal year 2020 to fiscal year 2023. Many attribute the rise in these crimes to fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We are starting to see shifts in terms of the mental health of our young people as a result of that unprecedented experience that we all went through and that some people are still going through,” Nekima Levy Armstrong of the Wayfinder Foundation, a Black- and brown-women led justice advocacy organization, said Thursday.
“We have to put kid gloves on when we are talking about our children.”
Less than 10% of violent crime in Maryland is committed by children. Advocates said Thursday that the bill is not fact-based and was introduced because of sensationalist media reports, pointing specifically to WBFF-TV, known as Fox 45 in Baltimore City, and the Sinclair Broadcast Group.
David Smith, a co-owner of The Baltimore Sun, is Sinclair’s chairman.
“It’s important for us to continue to challenge the legislature so that Fox 45 doesn’t control how this legislature does its policy,” Love said.
Advocates and the handful of lawmakers who oppose the bill worry that the legislation will further racial disparities in Maryland’s juvenile justice system.
They also say that it will roll back advances made to state policy passed in the Juvenile Justice Reform Act of 2022 — particularly the measure that limited the crimes children aged 10 to 12 can be charged with to only those classified as violent under Maryland law.
The Juvenile Justice Reform Act was informed by data, and crafted from recommendations from a council that met to study best practices in policy for over two years.
Though they started in an identical posture, the bill’s legislative measures have diverged as the policy worked its way through the House and Senate chambers. House Bill 814 would allow children to be arrested for firearms charges, animal mutilation, vehicle theft and third-degree sex offenses. Its counterpart, Senate Bill 744, mirrors that policy but strikes the provision accounting for animal abuse.
“Our children … need care not cages. Period,” said Sankara-Jabar. “This is not an evidence-based bill.”