Juvenile Detention Reform in Baltimore in the Year of Freddie Gray

This is the first in a peri­od­ic series of sto­ries about progress in JDAI sites across the nation.

2015 was a dif­fi­cult year for Bal­ti­more. The events sur­round­ing Fred­die Gray’s death were trag­ic, as was the unrest that fol­lowed. But when it came to juve­nile deten­tion reform, Bal­ti­more lead­ers spun a dif­fer­ent and alto­geth­er more hope­ful tale, refus­ing to allow the cri­sis in the streets to derail the progress being made in deal­ing with young peo­ple in trou­ble with the law. 

At the height of the unrest on Mon­day, April 27, the sec­re­tary of Maryland’s Depart­ment of Juve­nile Ser­vices (DJS), Sam Abed, made a com­mand deci­sion to detain vir­tu­al­ly all youth tak­en into cus­tody until morn­ing. But almost imme­di­ate­ly, DJS returned to nor­mal oper­a­tions. The state’s attor­ney declined to press charges against the major­i­ty of youth who had been detained, and most were released on April 28. 

In the weeks after the cri­sis, DJS staff re-eval­u­at­ed the deci­sion-mak­ing process employed dur­ing the unrest and iden­ti­fied sev­er­al ways the state might avoid the overuse of deten­tion dur­ing any future cri­sis. Since April, Bal­ti­more has seen a steady decline in the use of deten­tion — sus­tain­ing a peri­od of marked progress that began in 2011.

Before 2011, Baltimore’s Juve­nile Deten­tion Alter­na­tives Ini­tia­tive (JDAI) efforts had gained lit­tle trac­tion. In fact, from JDAI’s start-up in 2000 through 2010, Baltimore’s aver­age dai­ly pop­u­la­tion in deten­tion (ADP) fell only 15%, which was among the small­est reduc­tions in JDAI sites nationwide. 

The sit­u­a­tion began to turn around in 2011 with new lead­er­ship in DJS and the Bal­ti­more City juve­nile court. That is when DJS invit­ed the Casey Foun­da­tion to work with DJS staff to per­form a brand new sys­tem assess­ment, just as it would do for a new JDAI site. Based on the analy­sis, Baltimore’s JDAI col­lab­o­ra­tive cre­at­ed five work­ing sub­com­mit­tees and began mak­ing sig­nif­i­cant head­way in reduc­ing lengths of stay for youth pend­ing place­ment, while par­ing down the num­ber of those detained through auto­mat­ic holds. After hov­er­ing for sev­er­al years at or around 120 youth, the ADP of juve­nile court youth in deten­tion began declin­ing rapid­ly in the sec­ond half of 2012. In fis­cal year 2013, juve­nile ADP aver­aged 84 youth, and in 2014 the aver­age fell to 62. 

In 2015, DJS and its part­ners on the Bal­ti­more JDAI col­lab­o­ra­tive con­tin­ued to push for deep­er reforms. A new sys­tem of grad­u­at­ed sanc­tions was ini­ti­at­ed in Maryland’s juve­nile pro­ba­tion sys­tem to reduce the use of deten­tion as pun­ish­ment for tech­ni­cal vio­la­tions, and the state’s risk assess­ment instru­ment was fur­ther tweaked in 2015 fol­low­ing a major over­haul in 2014.

The most recent data on Baltimore’s JDAI progress, which exam­ines all youth resid­ing in Bal­ti­more City (regard­less of where they are detained), shows that these efforts are pay­ing off. Use of deten­tion con­tin­ued to fall through Sep­tem­ber 2015, when an aver­age of 48 Bal­ti­more City youth were in deten­tion each night. Juve­nile arrests have also been falling, sug­gest­ing that the reduced use of deten­tion is not com­pro­mis­ing pub­lic safety. 

Nate Balis, direc­tor of Casey’s Juve­nile Jus­tice Strat­e­gy Group, said ​“Of course, Bal­ti­more is only one exam­ple. Mean­ing­ful advances in juve­nile jus­tice reform are hap­pen­ing across the coun­try, and we look for­ward to shar­ing more sto­ries about progress in JDAI sites in this blog.”