A Maryland senator is working to keep history from repeating itself in Maryland’s juvenile justice system. But to move forward, he’s first looking back.
Sen. William C. Smith, Jr. (D-Montgomery County) is bringing a spotlight to the deaths of as many as 300 Black youths at the Cheltenham House of Reformation, a juvenile detention facility near Andrews Air Force Base in southern Prince George’s County. The youths are buried with few markers in an overgrown wooded area adjacent to the Cheltenham Veterans Cemetery.
“The state should ultimately, obviously issue a formal apology for the way that we’ve handled these youths,” Smith told Capital News Service.
Smith, chair of the Judicial Proceedings Committee, called for a commission to conduct an independent investigation into what happened at Cheltenham and plans to introduce legislation when the Senate convenes next month.
Smith found that juveniles charged and processed as adults wind up costing the state about $17 million a year, or about $150,000 per juvenile. During the time juveniles are processed as adults, which can take up to 180 days on average, they are not provided services or education.
“That’s been a major core focus of mine, is just reforming this process because I think you’re going to save money, and you’re going to have better safety outcomes, and you’re also, by the way, going to have better outcomes for the youth,” Smith said.
In the January 2026 General Assembly session, Smith will reintroduce Senate Bill 422, which would raise the age at which a juvenile would be eligible to be tried as an adult from 14 to 16. The bill would also eliminate certain crimes for which 16-year-olds are currently eligible to be charged as adults. The bill was originally introduced in January 2025.
Maryland is in violation of federal standards designed to keep juveniles out of the adult prison population. Under Maryland law, juveniles are charged as adults for 33 offenses, but under federal law, juveniles aren’t supposed to be locked up with the adults in prison or jails, according to data from the United States Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. As a result, the rate of Maryland youth in the adult prison population is eight times the federal standard in 2024, according to the Governor’s Office of Crime Prevention and Policy.
While advocating for Maryland juveniles today, Smith learned about other Maryland juveniles who never got justice.
In the 1800s, much like the federal guidelines today, the General Assembly recognized the need to separate children from adults in the system, so they created two institutions for juveniles: The House of Refuge for Juvenile Delinquents for white boys and The House of Reformation for Colored Boys at Cheltenham for Black juvenile boys.
Smith has worked with multiple agency members to research the conditions at Cheltenham and visited the institution’s burial site in the woods, covered with thorns and overgrown grass. There are four headstones with writing and dozens of moss-covered cinderblocks marking the resting place for others who died between 1877 and 1941, according to death certificates. Researchers originally thought there were 80 graves of the young boys at the Cheltenham burial site. A Washington Post investigation found at least 230 youth died in custody, but the number could be higher. Smith said the number of young boys buried there is closer to 300. A vast majority of the graves are unidentified.
“There are racist, systemic inequities that are baked in and still present today,” Smith said. “That shouldn’t be controversial, I think it’s just incumbent upon us to identify, to understand and then to address it.”
Read more about the lives of the youths at Cheltenham and other institutions in Maryland →
Smith said not only should the burial site be improved but what happened to the youths before they ended up at the burial site needs to be addressed.
“The stories need to be told, people need to be identified, families need to be reconnected with this history and story,” Smith said. “The field and the graveyard need to be restored and maintained to a place of proper reverence for what happened there.”
Smith added, “At a time where there are efforts to reclassify, erase history, fail to acknowledge things, I think this is the perfect time to say, you know, we need to look this history in the eye and understand what we’re doing in the modern time to curtail injustices that we see that have permeated.”
Nicole Ramos contributed to this article.
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