If you're a juvenile suspect detained in the state of Maryland, you can expect to be exposed to some of the harshest aspects of the adult criminal justice system despite your age. Here's what happens:
When you arrive at a detention facility you'll be stripped naked and subjected to a humiliating search of your body. When you're transported to your court hearing you'll be shackled in chains hand and foot. The whole process will be repeated every time you return to the facility from a doctor's appointment or a visit home with family. All these things are going to happen regardless of the seriousness of the charges against you, regardless of whether you are a high- or low-risk detainee and regardless of whether you're ever convicted of any crime.
Those findings of a Sun investigation shocked members of the Maryland General Assembly, and rightly so. We're supposed to treat juveniles differently from hardened adult criminals. And in a recent report, the Department of Juvenile Services said it would be willing to consider changes. But it resisted legislators' requests to make public the policies and procedures governing those techniques and data to support their use. Now officials say they will provide the policies to a legislative task force, which is set to begin hearings in September, but on the condition that members not share the information with the public. That's not good enough.
DJS insists its policies and procedures are in line the with the best practices endorsed by the U.S. Department of Justice and the American Correctional Association, the prison industry's trade organization. But those bodies focus on adult offenders, not juveniles.
By contrast, the best practices advocated by the Baltimore-based Annie E. Casey Foundation are specifically designed to address the needs of juvenile detainees. They recommend that mechanical restraints such as handcuffs and shackles be used sparingly and only as a last resort, and that staff in youth facilities employ the least restrictive means possible to ensure their own security and that of other detainees.
The agency also seems to have a habit of cherry-picking the examples it uses to justify its indiscriminately harsh methods. For example, DJS has cited the case of Hannah Wheeling, a 65-year-old teacher at the Cheltenham Youth Facility in Prince George's County who was murdered by one of her students in 2010. The agency argues the incident shows that even juveniles considered low-risk detainees, like the youth convicted of murdering Wheeling, are capable of committing serious crimes and that therefore the agency's use of strip searches and shackles is not indiscriminate but a necessary precaution against such incidents recurring.
Wheeling was bludgeoned to death with a concrete block by a student after staff violated numerous safety procedures, including leaving him unattended for an hour before the incident. Her death was horrible, but it was also an outlier among all the possible security risks facing the state's youth facilities, and given the unique circumstances of that case the use of strip searches and shackles would not have prevented it. When the state relies on such extreme examples to prove its case, all it does in paint every youthful offender in the system as a potentially dangerous killer when that's clearly not the case. When asked by legislators for a fuller picture of efforts to smuggle contraband into youth facilities, DJS officials have failed to respond.
Youth advocates say that until recently, information the task force is seeking was readily available online. That's why it's so puzzling that the state is now saying that handing over its written policies and procedures would make its facilities less safe. Where's the evidence for that, and how is the task force supposed to determine if those policies and procedures are appropriate if DJS refuses to even tell lawmakers what they are?
The state claims that complying with the task force's requests would compromise the security of staff and inmates at its facilities by releasing information that criminals could use to circumvent the safeguards in place against detainees smuggling weapons, drugs and other contraband into its facilities. Instead, it's telling the lawmakers, youth advocates, public defenders, prosecutors and others who make up the panel: "Trust us."
That's not good enough. The lack of transparency about exactly how Maryland treats its most vulnerable wards is at best an invitation to abuses. At worst, it's a cruel violation of its youthful victims' civil rights and human dignity. DJS needs to come clean about what it's doing, why it's doing it and whether the data show its methods are effective and necessary.
Correction: An earlier version of this editorial misstated the Department of Juvenile Services stance on making public its policies on strip searching and shackling the youths in its custody. This spring, the department resisted legislators' requests to make those policies public, but officials now say they will provide them to a General Assembly task force provided that members keep them confidential. The Sun regrets the error.