July 23, 2025
The unmarked graves of Black boys have reignited scrutiny of Maryland’s troubled criminal justice past.
Maryland state senator William C. Smith (D) and former Department of Juvenile Services Secretary Vincent Schiraldi want funding to protect and memorialize a site where 100 unmarked graves of Black children, some from the 1800s, were discovered.
The burial site, located near Prince George’s County’s Cheltenham Youth Detention Center, was close to the former House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children, the Washington Informer reports. The facility, founded in 1870 to confine Black boys as young as 5 years old, was notorious for forced labor and rampant neglect of the boys.
“We have to make sure we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past,” Schiraldi told The Washington Post. “They were segregating kids by race and treating the kids of color more poorly and burying them in a potter’s field. But at least they were taking them out of the adult prisons of the day.”
After being among the group to rediscover the burial site, Schiraldi hopes to see it transformed into a proper cemetery, giving the children buried there the recognition and remembrance they deserve.
“I want us to find out the names of those young people and do more historical investigation,” he told NPR’s All Things Considered. “I want at least—at least—a stone with all those young people’s names. I want to be able for people to get to those graves and mourn children because I’m sure they have extended family in Maryland. I want us to preserve the stones ’cause they’re deteriorating and falling apart like we would do for any other cemetery.”
Maryland now ranks fourth nationwide for incarcerating people for crimes committed as children and charges more youth as adults per capita than nearly any other state, trailing Alabama. Black children are seven times more likely than white children to face adult charges.
The recently uncovered unmarked graves stand as a haunting reminder of the state’s deep, centuries-old scarred criminal justice system.
“Maryland’s shameful legacy of racism, neglect, and abuse in its treatment of young lives continues to this day,” said Olivia Naugle, Youth Justice Campaign strategist at The Sentencing Project. “More than 150 years later, though desegregated by the courts and operating under a new name, it still overwhelmingly detains youth of color, who are often charged as if they were adults.”
Advocates cite Maryland’s sweeping list of 33 offenses that automatically funnel youth into adult court as one of the harshest policies in the country. While more than half of U.S. states have scaled back or eliminated similar practices, Maryland won’t budge.
Smith, chair of the state Senate’s Judicial Proceedings Committee, said he is dedicated to reintroducing legislation that would lower the number of offenses that could send children to adult prison.
“We have the opportunity to reckon with the injustices of the past through action in the present,” Smith wrote on Facebook.
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