CHELTENHAM, Md. — On July 17, Sen. Will Smith visited a gravesite near a juvenile reform center in Prince George’s County, previously known as Boys Village. While some graves display the names of the deceased, many are entirely unmarked or covered by foliage. Dozens of primarily Black children from centuries past are thought to be buried near the gravesite, though the exact figure remains unconfirmed.
Boys Village was established as a detention center in 1870, and many of the young men sent there who died in custody were buried in a nearby gravesite without proper burial procedures.
Following Smith’s tour of the gravesite in Cheltenham last week, he noted it as a “sobering experience” and declared that we must use Boys Village as a learning experience for the future.
“Last week, I had the sobering experience of touring previously unacknowledged burial grounds of youth who died in the custody of a segregated, Blacks-only youth facility operated by the state of Maryland more than a century ago in Cheltenham, Maryland — the predecessor of today’s Cheltenham Youth Detention Center,” Smith explained to The BayNet in a statement.
Smith also told The BayNet that he wishes to officially recognize all of the young boys buried near Boys Village, and that youth in Maryland deserve proper centers for juvenile detention, as opposed to mixing children into adult prisons. Smith continued:
“It was a heartbreaking experience. And while, of course, I offer my prayers for these young people and wish to officially recognize those who have been forgotten for far too long, this needs to be a time for more than prayer, recognition and healing. Now must be a time of action — a time to reform a law that today sends Black youth into our adult prisons, as opposed to juvenile facilities, at rates that are indefensible.”
Highway signs may soon be installed in Maryland to educate the public about Boys Village and its history as a juvenile detention center, as the first step to rectifying this injustice is preventing history from repeating itself in the future.
The All-Too-Recent History of Unjust Youth Detention in Maryland
A recent report on the incarceration and trauma rates for juvenile inmates states, “Maryland ranks in the top five states for the percentage of its prison population that has been incarcerated since childhood.”
Though the mass incarceration of youth may seem like a tragedy of the distant past, we can find unjust laws dating back to as recently as the 1990s — and even today, according to the report referenced above.
“In Maryland, the Super Predator Era led to a particularly draconian statute allowing children to be automatically tried as adults for 33 different crimes. The automatic charging of children as adults began in 1986 with legislation allowing children charged with handgun crimes to be excluded from the original jurisdiction of the juvenile court. In 1994, the legislature added 17 more crimes to the list. This lengthy list of crimes made Maryland a national outlier and likely explains the state’s ranking as fourth highest in the nation for people currently incarcerated for crimes they committed as children.”
While we can’t go back in time to correct the mistakes of Maryland’s past, we can restore dignity to those buried in Cheltenham by updating unmarked graves near Boys Village and adjusting our legal system so that every child convicted of a crime in Maryland can be given the second chance they deserve at a juvenile detention center.
To learn more about the history of the incarceration of youth as adults in Maryland, visit marylandmatters.org.
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