BALTIMORE — It was a question a lot of people in Baltimore still want the answer to.
That question was asked by a man at a recent town hall about juvenile crime: “If you have a juvenile that comes in, and say, he’s only stolen a car. He hasn’t done a carjacking. Why do you guys let them go home?"
The head of DJS, Secretary Vincent Schiraldi responded, "We don’t necessarily let them go home. It’s a combination of risk and severity. So if this was a first offender car theft, decent chance that kid would go home with services. If it’s not, and the kid is high-risk, we detain them.”
"I'm asking this question because I know of a juvenile who is causing many problems in the southern district. He has been taken in over nine times for stealing cars, robbing people, carjacking people, this kid is on the street as of right now. So I don't understand why you're saying that you do this, when it's not happening," the South Baltimore resident asked.
Schiraldi couldn’t supply an answer.
"I don’t know the details of these cases. Typically, when I hear stuff like this and I look into the details, it’s far more complicated than what I'm hearing," he told the resident, who protested, "It’s not complicated, sir."
Schiraldi again said, “I don’t know what’s happened in this particular case.”
Just last week, The Department of Juvenile Services (DJS) fired an intake director at Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center (BCJCC) following an investigation into the premature release of two teens arrested for assaulting and robbing a woman in November.
But we don’t like to rely solely on anecdotes. So we submitted a Public Information Act request to DJS to get some data.
We found that from 2021, to 2023, the number of juvenile complaints more than doubled in Baltimore. But the percentage of kids who were actually detained went down.
24% of all juvenile complaints led to detention in 2021. In 2023, it was 13%. The average length of stay in a facility also went down - from 23 days to 16 days.
We asked Catharine Rosenblatt, head of the juvenile division in the State’s Attorney’s Office, to weigh in.
“I can tell you from anecdotal experience, it's pretty difficult to actually get a kid held at BCJCC, pending their adjudication. It is much more common to have the kid released back to family home or guardian, while on some form of electronic monitoring."
So, why is this happening?
By law, DJS has to refer all violent cases, like carjackings, to the State’s Attorney’s Office.
But what the Juvenile Justice Reform Act changed in 2022, is that juveniles arrested for non-violent offenses, like car thefts, can be diverted without prosecutor approval.
"So it's DJS making those decisions about those cases completely independently,” Rosenblatt said.
At that same town hall where neighbors pressed DJS on why so many kids were being sent home after committing a crime, Rosenblatt publicly expressed her concerns with the department.
“Currently, DJS acts as a gatekeeper of sorts, in that we have to wait for them to forward us cases to charge. It doesn’t matter if a juvenile has been arrested, DJS can send them home without the state’s attorney’s office or a judge or a magistrate reviewing the case," she told the audience.
Ina recent end-of-year interview, recapping 2023 and looking ahead to 2024, we asked Secretary Schiraldi what he thinks needs to change.
"We need to do a lot more work on fixing the way we administer youth justice, not much in terms of how we change the laws. The laws - we're actually in decent shape,” Schiraldi said.
The State’s Attorney’s office does want to see some changes to the law.
Rosenblatt says one of the biggest priorities is requiring any juveniles arrested for a car theft or gun crime be immediately referred to their office for charging, and seen before a judge within 24 hours.
And State’s Attorney Ivan Bates said at the end of the yearhe wanted to increase the probationary period for such crimes.
"I do think, Secretary Schiraldi, just as much as my office, wants to move away from the churn of kids simply re-offending their way through the system until they get to be adults. That's certainly an indication that the juvenile system isn't working, if the kids just keep churning through until they hit 18,” Bates explained.
In September, DJS released a research brief called “Putting Youth Crime in Maryland in Context.” The report shows an increase in overall juvenile crime in Maryland over the last two years since a pandemic low, but notes that complaints are still below pre-pandemic levels and are down by over 50% over the past decade. Rosenblatt says her office is seeing a large increase in cases.
“We have approximately 650 cases that were charged in 2023. And when I compare that to how many cases were charged in 2022, and 2021, we're looking at nearly twice as much. In '22, we charged approximately 330. And in 2021, it was about the same. So we're looking at a serious increase,” Rosenblatt said.
But she acknowledges their numbers always differ from DJS numbers because the State’s Attorney’s Office does not see any cases that were diverted successfully.
We asked Rosenblatt, do you believe the problem is more that there are more juveniles committing crimes? Or, is it that there’s more juveniles not being held accountable for their crimes?
She responded, "I honestly don't think it's just one. I think it's quite possible that it's both. I think we're going to look back years and decades from now, and see a big shift, not just as a result of the changes in law, but as I think we're going to see the play out of COVID, and the shutdown of schools and the impact that that had/ I think we might be seeing some of that now, I also don't think I can say any of that definitively. But I do think we're, I mean, with the fact that our numbers practically doubled in a year, we're seeing something very new, and it's very troubling."
Among legislators, there seems to be an appetite for changes to the Juvenile Justice Reform Act. The legislative session begins on January 10.
