Youth, Incarceration, and Death in Maryland

This course will examine a tortured chapter in Maryland’s history; a chapter that continues to be written because of evidence that has yet to be gathered and analyzed.

In summer 2025, news broke that a burial site was discovered (really rediscovered) adjacent to the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center (“Cheltenham”). Cheltenham is in Prince George’s County and is a “secure detention center” for “youth who are waiting to go to court or be placed in a youth facility.” Cheltenham was originally named the House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children (“House of Reformation”), which opened in 1870. From 1872 to 1939, at least 230 Black boys, ranging from eight years of age to teenagers, died while in custody at the House of Reformation. They remain buried there today, some in marked graves and others in unmarked graves. Based on preliminary investigations, it is likely that more children are buried there. Death records state that many of the children died from disease, such as consumption, pneumonia, scarlet fever, and lockjaw. The conditions of incarceration were horrendous—some of the children were leased out to toil on farms in Prince George’s County—and it is possible (indeed probable) that some children died from physical abuse.

These children died at a time when youth incarceration in Maryland was racially segregated. In 1960, Juanita Jackson Mitchell (Maryland Carey Law’s first Black female gradate) and colleagues including Thurgood Marshall filed a complaint asserting that racially segregated “training schools” (as these institutions were called) violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Later that year, after a hearing in the Circuit Court of Baltimore—Ms. Jackson Mitchell was the lead attorney for the plaintiffs—the Court declared the Maryland’s laws that mandated racial segregation of these “training schools” to be unconstitutional.

This course sets out to accomplish three tasks: 1) contribute to the investigations into the truths of the House of Reformation, including why children were confined there; the conditions of confinement (including policies, labor practices, modes of discipline and medical care); the causes of deaths; and the stories told (and untold) about the deaths to families, communities, and government officials); 2) assisting efforts to research, analyze, and recommend processes to repair families (descendants of the deceased children) and communities, and to acknowledge the history; and 3) connect the history to present-day youth incarceration in Maryland (for instance, Maryland automatically charges more children as adults per capita than every state except Alabama; over 80% of children so charged are Black and 90% are of color).

Overall, this course aims to find and surface this horrid history to ensure that it is not repeated, while helping to design processes for families and communities to heal. Simply put, it is about the truth: finding it, telling it, recognizing it, and redressing it.