MICHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: Last week, Maryland State Senator Will Smith went to tour the excess property on the site of a government facility dating to the 19th century. But he didn't just go to see what could be done with it now. He went to think about why so little care was taken with it then. The site was an old cemetery on what was once the House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children. It appears that more than a hundred unmarked graves of Black children are in that cemetery.
Smith wants the grave site to be cleaned up and the deaths acknowledged. But he also wants the site to push Marylanders to reconsider how they treat juvenile offenders, which Smith says is out of step with best practices and the rest of the country. And Senator Smith is with us now to tell us more about it. Good morning. Thank you for joining us.
WILLIAM SMITH: Good morning. Thank you for having me.
MARTIN: Well, first of all, tell us where you went. What was there?
SMITH: So we went down to this facility, which is the Cheltenham facility. It's a juvenile detention center in Prince George's County.
MARTIN: It's still in use?
SMITH: It's still in use. This center opened up in 1870s. And the history is amazing if you go back. So in 1830, the Maryland General Assembly said and recognized that children should not be placed in adult jails. And so they set forth to create a facility for white children only. And so that's when you had the House of Refuge created for white children only. Forty years later, the General Assembly gets around to creating the House of Reformation and Instruction for Black children in the juvenile justice system.
MARTIN: And what is your understanding about these graves? What do these graves tell you?
SMITH: We have records of 80 children buried on these two plots here, mostly in unmarked graves. There are only four gravestones still visible. Only three are legible today. And so you've got over a hundred graves, unmarked graves, of children as young as 9, 8, 6 years old who were buried here, never reclaimed by their families. You wonder, did the family ever know what happened? Was there a ceremony? Were they just kind of unceremoniously placed in a sack and buried? It's something that's lost to time and history.
MARTIN: What was your specific interest in this? You draw a specific through line from that to the current moment. What is it?
SMITH: So I'm chair of the Judicial Proceedings Committee in Maryland, and so juvenile justice falls under the purview of the committee that I chair. And we're still sending more kids to adult prison facilities than any other state except for Alabama. And 9 out of the 10 of them are children of color, 8 of 10 are Black children. Also, 80% of these children that start off in the adult system will end up going back to the juvenile system. We're just wasting time and money, and we're ruining lives in the interim.
MARTIN: Why is it that Maryland is so out of step with the direction the rest of the country seems to be going in?
SMITH: The structure of Maryland's law now is that there are a number of crimes that are automatically charged, or eligible to be automatically charged, as an adult crime. And that means that that kid goes into an adult facility, an adult jail, pending the outcome of that case.
MARTIN: But it's also the case that sometimes juveniles are involved in things that the public finds very disturbing. So what are you saying should happen?
SMITH: First of all is that the most violent crimes are excluded from this modest proposal that I'm putting forward. Things like murder, gun crimes are out. The majority of the crimes, though, that come back into the juvenile system - here's why it's important to do this, because you're going to get better public safety outcomes. You're going to get better attention and resources for that youth that is justice-involved. And you're going to save a lot of money that can be redirected for prevention measures.
MARTIN: So Maryland has a list of about 30 crimes where juveniles are automatically sent to the adult court system. And it's up to a judge to intervene and say, actually, no, this isn't appropriate to that. You want to raise the age when people can be tried as an adult from 14 to 16. Fourteen-year-olds are eligible to be tried as adults in Maryland?
SMITH: For certain crimes, 14-year-olds are eligible. What happens in the adult system is that the child will linger and languish in the adult prison for months without services, without care, without treatment. And in that time, they're getting exposed to some terrible things. And they're not being treated for the underlying reasons that they committed the crime in the first place.
MARTIN: So before I let you go, let's loop back to where we started our conversation, this particular grave site. And I do want to note that there's a veterans' cemetery very nearby, which is kept in pristine condition. I've attended services there. What do you think should happen to the site?
SMITH: So it actually abuts the site. The way that we treat veterans and the way that we treat kind of these lost souls is so evident when you go to this site because it's pristine, manicured lawns - rightfully so - next to overgrown foliage, downed trees. We understand that these youths may have been justice-involved, but they were people's futures. And every one of those headstones, to me, represented a lost opportunity, a lost future and a failure of our system. And also, you can't deny that it's a direct result of how we treated Black youth in Maryland. And that legacy cannot be forgotten.
MARTIN: That is Maryland State Senator Will Smith. Senator Smith, thanks so much for talking to us.
SMITH: Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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