Capital News Service reporters investigated Maryland’s once-segregated juvenile justice system across two semesters, from fall 2025 through spring 2026, examining the history of the House of Reformation for Colored Boys at Cheltenham alongside the House of Refuge for Juvenile Delinquents, now the Charles H. Hickey, Jr. School, and also investigated the Maryland House of Correction at Jessup. The series of seven articles can be found at the following page.
Archives & Libraries
Reporters made three visits to the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis, where they reviewed annual and biennial reports, grand jury working papers and administrative records dating to the 1860s. Additional archival research was conducted at the Thurgood Marshall State Law Library, the University of Baltimore Special Collections and Archives, the Enoch Pratt Free Library, the University of Maryland’s Hornbake Library and the Special Collections of the Baltimore City Archives. Reporters also searched the NAACP’s online archival records, uncovering correspondence related to Thurgood Marshall’s advocacy for Cheltenham boys. Journalists extracted details about annual deaths, revenues and disease rates from annual reports, which were then visualized. Dozens of Baltimore grand jury records were reviewed.
Data &Digital Tools
Scanned death certificates containing handwritten text were processed using a Python script and Google Gemini to extract structured data, which reporters then verified against source records and analyzed in R. Reporters also compared Cheltenham coverage in The Baltimore Sun to the the Afro-American, which involved a computational text analysis of 1,030 articles. Visualizations were built in Flourish and Datawrapper. Google Pinpoint, an AI research tool, was used to organize and search large volumes of scanned historical documents. Claude was used to assist with research synthesis.
Interviews, Research
Reporters interviewed state officials, current and former Maryland lawmakers, juvenile justice researchers, public health experts, historians and community advocates from across the country.
To reconstruct the lives of boys incarcerated at Cheltenham, reporters used Ancestry.com and FamilySearch to search census records, death certificates, draft records and institutional intake documents. Reporters also contacted and interviewed descendants of former Cheltenham inmates, whose family histories added personal dimension to the documentary record.
The CNS team included: Mira Beinart, Mara Bell, Isabella Carrero-Baptista, Zaka Hossain, Ela Jalil, Molecule Jongwilai, Aline Behar Kado, Owen Korzak, Akira Kyles, Nina Wilson, Haley Parsley, Nicole Ramos, and Tiasia Saunders. Alex Taylor from the CNS Annapolis bureau covered the state legislative developments related to Cheltenham.
The project was based on the initial reporting by Nicole Ramos.
The project was led by Rob Wells, Ph.D., associate professor, with assistance from CNS editors Deborah Berry and Stacey Decker. Sean Mussenden of the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism and Josh Land of Merrill College also assisted.
Special thanks Crystal Foretia, Carol Miller, Mary Hennigan, Lula Beatty, JP Williams, Karen Scrivo and Cheryl Hill-Herder for sharing their expertise.
