Among the key findings of a report set to be released Monday by a Baltimore nonprofit is a claim that data on juvenile justice in Maryland is “frustratingly incongruent” across agencies, causing analysis of youth crime and how prevalent it is to be “contentious and disputable.”
“Beyond the Headlines: What We Know and Don’t Know About Baltimore Youth Crime and Justice,” which was funded and published by the Abell Foundation, concluded that inconsistency in data “makes it challenging — if not impossible — to track and compare trends across the system.”
Most metrics — youth arrests, prosecutions and juvenile system contacts — have risen in Baltimore out of historic lows reached during the coronavirus pandemic, but agencies disagree over which numbers are accurate and whether the increases show more than a simple rebound.
The report’s author, Robin Campbell owns a communications firm focused on criminal justice reform; his clients include organizations that advocate for alternatives to incarceration and assist those who’ve been released from the justice system.
In an interview with The Baltimore Sun, Campbell, said, that “trying to get the facts about Baltimore-area youth justice is sort of like assembling a puzzle, and you’ve collected the pieces through a scavenger hunt.”
And “without clearer data,” he said, “the public’s perception of the issue is “based on the headlines” about individual cases.
Campbell’s report says that Information about youth offenders and offenses, as well as the response to them, is “deeply siloed” across agencies, and what they measure, when varies. He also found that while Baltimore Police Department data and statistics from the Department of Juvenile Services show a continuation of a decades-long decline in youth crime, those numbers only give clues — but not answers.
In a 15-page response to the 19-page report, shared with The Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office argued that measuring youth crime by the number of juvenile cases it prosecutes each year provides a clearer picture than police or DJS data. The office’s numbers, which include “paper referrals” but not cases handled informally by DJS, show that the 2024 fiscal year had the most youth charges overall since fiscal 2017. Almost 450 of them were violent crime cases — the most charged in at least the past decades.
“As you can see by our numbers, crime is far from ‘down’ over the past few years within the juvenile justice system,” the state’s attorney’s office wrote, attributing the drop in youth arrests since 2017 to Baltimore Police’s consent decree with the Department of Justice as well as other juvenile justice reforms.
The Abell report follows up on the foundation’s 2018 paper, co-written by an Abell vice president and a foundation analyst, analyzing available data on juvenile crime and case outcomes.
Since then, arrests of youth reported by Baltimore Police and DJS intake complaints from the city both decreased before taking a major dive amid the coronavirus pandemic. The numbers have gone back up since the pandemic, but are on par with the pre-pandemic numbers, according to Campbell’s report.
Both reports said that data between city and state agencies involved in the juvenile justice system is difficult to compare. Some agencies count arrests — which Campbell said “aren’t the perfect measure, but they tend to be the standard” — while others count complaints received and forwarded by DJS, which would include cases without an arrest. Some follow a calendar year, while others use a fiscal year.
The data challenges have led to disputes over whether youth crime is actually decreasing. After another nonprofit, The Sentencing Project, released a 2024 report showing drops in youth arrests, Baltimore State’s Attorney Ivan Bates criticized the organization in an op-ed saying that the report did “not accurately represent my office’s data or the experiences of Baltimore City’s residents.”
Bates, who was quoted in the 2024 report as calling juvenile crime “out of control” amid lower arrest figures from police, said that the nonprofit had failed to account for hundreds of “paper referrals” — cases where a young person is apprehended and brought to booking but is released.
He made a similar argument in the response to Monday’s report.
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“Playing with numbers in no way changes the reality that people are seeing on a daily basis,” Bates’ office wrote. “Regardless of how close we get with factual data aligning with each agency, the reality felt in the communities of Baltimore City, and dare we say the rest of the state, is that juvenile crime has skyrocketed over the past two to three years.”
The Abell report notes that city prosecutors pursued a higher share of juvenile cases forwarded to city prosecutors in fiscal 2023 and fiscal 2024, after Bates took office and statewide juvenile justice reforms took effect. It says that in fiscal 2017 and 2018, an “astonishingly” high percentage were not being pursued by the end of the fiscal year — nearly half of them had been withdrawn by DJS, denied or dropped by the state’s attorney’s office, or dismissed.
But the report also questions how efficient the system is at prosecuting cases, noting “significant attrition” from the initial complaint stage to court dispositions. Only 29% of juvenile complaints forwarded to the State’s Attorney’s Office in fiscal 2024 resulted in the young person being committed or placed on probation, and even if all cases that were still pending at that point had that result, it’d still be less than half. In its response, the State’s Attorney’s Office pointed to DJS, saying that “there is nobody monitoring” cases received by the agency besides DJS itself.
Campbell called a new state committee on juvenile justice practices “immensely promising,” and said that it could help alleviate or fill the data gaps that his report highlights. The committee released its first report, which covered compliance issues related to children being held in adult detention, in November.
“I just think that their ability to be focused on youth justice issues is super promising, and I’m really hopeful that they continue to lead in that area,” he said.
Have a news tip? Contact Dan Belson at [email protected], on X as @DanBelson_ or on Signal as @danbels.62.