When I started working for Maryland’s Department of Juvenile Services in January 2023, I already had a deep knowledge of the agency’s past. I had previously researched and written about its Civil War-era history of racially segregated facilities. And I had been a steering committee member of the Maryland Juvenile Justice Coalition in the late 1990s, when the guards at three military-style youth boot camps routinely brutalized teenagers in their care. After a multipart investigation in the Baltimore Sun, the state shut down these camps and settled a class-action lawsuit with nearly 900 plaintiffs.
This history was visceral for me. After all, the juvenile justice department was still operating two of its formerly segregated facilities and one of its former boot camps. But early in my tenure as secretary, I began to notice how little it was discussed. At a time when some in Washington, D.C., were seeking to erase unsettling information from our nation’s past to create an Ozzie and Harriet — or, rather, an Archie Bunker — version of America, new recruits had little idea about the historical violence and segregation. The same went for most legislators.
So in July 2024, some of my colleagues and I began a historical research and education project. Led by Marc Schindler, then an assistant secretary and chief of staff with the department, my team and I searched the Maryland State Archives for grand jury and other investigative reports on the Blacks-only and Whites-only facilities. We scoured old newspapers for articles about what was once known as the House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children, but is now the site of Cheltenham Youth Detention Center. We also consulted with Claude Waters, a retired assistant superintendent of the facility and an unofficial departmental historian who had worked at Cheltenham for decades.
What we uncovered near this facility surprised even us: an overgrown potter’s field where dozens of Black boys who had died in the House of Reformation from the late 1800s to 1939 were buried. Some of the graves had headstones, but most were marked by unnamed, deteriorating cinder blocks. The way these children were treated in death has disturbing implications for current-day practices.
The Maryland juvenile justice system dates back to 1830, when the state adopted what was then a radical policy of jailing children and adults separately. The point was to shield kids, who were often jailed for minor offenses like vagrancy, from what corrections officials described as “the contaminating influences of evil and corrupt companions” in an 1870 report.
The state’s first juvenile correctional facility — the House of Refuge — opened its doors in 1855. But this Baltimore City jail was only for White boys., It would take the state almost 20 more years — and the end of the Civil War — to open the House of Reformation in Cheltenham for Black boys as young as 5.
The two youth prisons were by no means “separate but equal.” Our research revealed that, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the White facility received more funding from the state government and Baltimore City, more positive press attention, and more programming than the Black one. Even the facility names spoke to different attitudes about what these children were in need of: White youth required “refuge;” Black youth needed “reformation.”
While the Whites-only facility emphasized education, the state’s 1870 report prescribed work for Black “juvenile offenders” who could not “be expected to rise superior to the favored race.” To this end, boys at the House of Reformation were leased out to local farmers, often in cruel conditions. “I was at Cheltenham [three] years, [five] months, and a few days, and I had school two afternoons during this time,” a former prisoner named William Creasy told The Baltimore Afro-American newspaper in 1925. “They would hire the boys out with mean people who hated colored people, and the boys were worked just like slaves.”
The Afro-American followed the story for years, collecting accounts of wage theft, neglect, beatings and torture at the hands of Cheltenham staff. In the 1930s, the newspaper reported on boys picking frozen spinach and kale with their bare hands and working barefoot in the cold. Their reporting also uncovered instances of starvation, blindness, lashings, beatings with broomsticks, and “toe punishment,” a euphemism for forcing boys to bend over for “six to seven hours, right hand touching toe and left over his shoulder.”
In a 1939 exposé, Raymond Hobson, one of the very few Black employees at Cheltenham, told the Afro that he had been fired from his instructor position for his demeanor. “He has constantly refused to humble himself before officials and the 60 to 70 White instructors,” the paper explained. “He was too popular with the boys imprisoned there.”
Hobson also described a boy who was “struck in the face with a bunch of keys” and spent nine months in the hospital. As the child healed, he was beaten again, resulting in a four-day nosebleed. The official report, Hobson said, was that he was injured playing football.
On July 18, 2024, unofficial historian Waters took state youth corrections leader Schindler on a tour of the old Cheltenham facility. Crystal Foretia, a Govern for America fellow, and Tyrone Walker, the director of reentry services for Georgetown University’s Prisons and Justice Initiative, were also there. At the end of the tour, Waters told Schindler about the cemetery. They crossed the road and searched a wooded area on the grounds of the Cheltenham Veteran’s Cemetery for over an hour, but were unable to find the boys’ gravestones.
Foretia pressed on, finding references to the lost cemetery in documents, and obtaining aerial maps and land surveys from the Maryland Historical Trust. A larger group returned to the grounds on Oct. 31, 2024, and located the burial site. Over about two hours in the woods, they found four gravestones and about 80 graves marked with cinder blocks.
While the cause of death for most of these boys was listed as “natural causes,” one needs only a cursory understanding of the history of youth corrections to doubt such conclusions. In September 1934, former Cheltenham prisoner Harry Brown told the Afro that he’d helped conduct some of the burials but knew “of no effort to embalm the bodies or to notify parents or guardians of the boys’ deaths.”
Maryland’s youth corrections facilities weren’t desegregated until 1961. That’s when Thurgood Marshall and the state’s first Black woman lawyer, Juanita Jackson Mitchell, successfully litigated a case up to the state’s high court. This was seven years after the Brown v. Board of Education case was decided.
But visiting Maryland’s carceral facilities today, you’d hardly notice the legal end to segregation. The so-called Free State incarcerates young people in adult prisons at twice the national average, and, as you might predict, a disproportionate number of them are Black. These boys and girls make up 33% of the state’s youth population, but almost 92% of those charged as adults.
Maryland’s penchant for punishing kids as adults is largely a byproduct of the media-driven youth “superpredator” era of the 1990s. During this period, almost every state in the country passed laws making it easier to do so. For their part, Maryland lawmakers added 14 offenses to their list of charges that would automatically send a child into the adult system. Today, 33 separate offenses trigger these so-called “autowaivers” in the state.
My team publicly revealed the burial ground in July 2025 with Senator Will Smith, chair of Maryland’s Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee. He announced plans to introduce an autowaiver reform bill in the next legislative session, which starts in January 2026.
I actually attended this event as a former employee. My brief stint as secretary of Maryland’s juvenile justice system — from January 2023 to June 2025 — was deeply morally challenging. At the time of my resignation, more than 2/3 of the young people in our facilities were waiting for their adult charges to work their way through painfully slow criminal courts.
My research department informed me that young people charged as adults were spending 147 days in our custody, compared to 27 days for those tried in juvenile court, where the process moves more quickly. This was particularly disturbing because most of these young people either had their cases dismissed or were returned to the juvenile courts, where they should have been tried in the first place. This was something I could no longer participate in.
About a week before I quit, I learned of one such young man, who I’ll call R. The 17-year-old had been charged with misdemeanor gun possession — the number one offense for which youth in Maryland are prosecuted as adults. Despite his developmental disability and no prior delinquency, he spent three weeks in an adult jail, then six months in a juvenile facility. Then his case was dismissed.
R.’s experience was far from unique: 85% of boys and girls that Maryland automatically sends to the adult system eventually have their cases dropped or returned to juvenile court.
Numerous studies have found that processing kids in adult courts makes them more likely to reoffend, and to do so in a violent manner. The practice is so toxic that research shows that youth who are incarcerated in adult correctional facilities are at a 33% higher risk for an early death between the ages of 18 and 39.
Being tried as an adult can literally kill you.
My team and I returned to the Cheltenham graveyard in September, accompanied by members of Maryland’s Legislative Black Caucus. By then, an investigation by The Washington Post put the number of suspected graves to 230. (By comparison, the number of graves found near Florida’s Dozier School, which inspired the novel and film “Nickel Boys,” was around 80.)
The caucus members were clearly moved. They prayed, sang, wept, and held on to one another. Then they pledged to clean up the neglected burial ground. “We won’t be able to bring these lives back,” caucus chair Jheanelle Wilkins told the Afro, “but we can commemorate [them] and make sure that they are treated with dignity and use this as an opportunity to take action.”
Over and over in my 45-year career, I’ve witnessed dehumanization of young people — particularly young Black and Latino boys — whose liberty interests somehow seem to be discounted by the legal system. To me, this is the throughline from last century’s hidden burial ground to our current-day practice of autowaivers. That’s why we must study history — not just to shake our heads and lament the past, but to make sure we don’t repeat the worst of it.
Vincent Schiraldi is former secretary of the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services and has run youth services in Washington, D.C., and probation and corrections in New York City. He is currently a visiting fellow at the Pinkerton Foundation.
