Baltimore has more than 13,000 vacant and abandoned houses and buildings, a number that officials say has barely budged in decades. On Tuesday, state and local leaders announced a new initiative to redevelop those buildings.

Through the new project, dubbed the Reinvest Baltimore Program, 5,000 vacant properties will be redeveloped in five years, Gov. Wes Moore promised just before signing an executive order establishing the program.

Read more at WYPR.

Maryland’s Child Interrogation Protection Act is once again under the microscope, as Harford County Sheriff Jeff Gahler says the nearly two-year-old law is impeding his officers’ hunt for the gun used Friday in a fatal shooting at Joppatowne High School.

“This legislature has handcuffed police,” Gahler said during a press conference Friday afternoon, shortly after the shooting. “There are families of every other student in that school, and the parents of the shooter, who have a right to know why we all stand here today and why there’s a person who has been shot in one of our schools, and we are not allowed to ask the person who committed that act because of this crazy legislature we have in this state.”

Read more (and listen) at WYPR.

When Lamar arrived at the Youth Detention Center, the state-run facility in Baltimore for teens charged as adults, there were no available beds in the housing units or even in the medical unit, which typically functions as overflow when the detention center is full. Lamar was directed to the gym, where he estimates he slept for about two weeks.

WYPR isn’t using Lamar’s real name because he’s a minor and because he worries that speaking about his experience at YDC could hurt his ongoing court case.

Though the facility is designed to hold up to 50 boys and up to 10 girls at a time, data from the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, the agency that runs the facility, show YDC was over capacity every day in June and July. Because the facility only houses minors charged as adults, the trend is a sign that the Maryland criminal justice system is treating more teens as adults than in the past.

The exact number of teens sleeping in the gym fluctuates as teens cycle in and out of the detention center. Some days, there are no teens sleeping in the gym. On Friday, July 5, for example, the facility had 56 boys, but seven of them were sleeping in cells in the medical unit, and none were in the gym, according to DPSCS.

Read more (and listen) at WYPR.

Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, the Democratic nominee in the race for Maryland’s open U.S. Senate seat, recalls flying to California in June 2016, the weekend before the state’s primary election that year, to join now-Vice President Kamala Harris as she campaigned for U.S. Senate.

“What struck me during the time that I was there was that the weekend before this very exciting race, she was not talking about herself. She wasn’t even talking about her race. She was talking about me — asking me how things were going with me, with the job. She was asking about various issues, giving advice,” Alsobrooks said in an interview with WYPR.

That, in a nutshell, is who Harris is, Alsobrooks said.

“They say politicians talk about themselves, but what we know is leaders talk about others, and Vice President Harris is a leader,” she said.

Read more (and listen) at WYPR.

Maryland leaders voted Wednesday to cut $148 million from the state budget, due to what they described as “stagnant” revenues paired with rising health care and child care costs.

The cuts span state government. They include $12 million for local health departments, $6 million to boost security at higher education institutions, and a little over $1 million for pay raises at the Office of the Public Defender. Many of the reductions delay hiring for new positions in state government.

Gov. Wes Moore — who chairs the three-member Board of Public Works that approved the cuts — said the changes are designed to prioritize health care and child care spending.

“We know that when Marylanders have access to health care and also access to preventative care, and when families have access to affordable childcare, they are more likely to participate in our labor force and participate in our economy,” he said. “And the key is we’ve got to have an economy where more people can participate.”

Read more (and listen) at WYPR.

The debate over youth crime and what to do about it featured heavily in this year’s Maryland General Assembly. One of the more prominent bills to come out of the session that ended last week makes a slew of changes to the state’s juvenile justice system.

Among the most controversial parts of the bill expands the list of crimes with which a child between 10 and 12 years old can be charged. Current law allows prosecutors charge these children with violent crimes, including murder, rape, assault and carjacking. The legislation adds several misdemeanor gun offenses, as well as animal cruelty and third-degree sex offenses.

“We create a carve out for 10 to 12 year olds, where they may not be detained,” Del. Luke Clippinger, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, said in a recent interview. “However, detention is a term of art, and they could potentially see community detention, which could be electronic home monitoring or other programming closer to where they live.”

The legislation creates a different process for children between 10 and 12 years old who are accused of car theft. In those circumstances, the Department of Juvenile Services would be required to file a CINS petition, which stands for Children In Need of Supervision. With a judge’s approval, the child would receive DJS services and in some cases may be removed from their home.

Read more (and listen) at WYPR.

Over the last several years, hundreds of Maryland children have spent weeks, sometimes months in hospitals for no medical reason. That practice is now the subject of a lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court. WYPR’s Rachel Baye has been reporting on this issue and joined Ashley Sterner to explain.

Sterner: Rachel, tell us what’s going on here.

Baye: For several years now, children in Maryland’s foster care system who have severe behavioral health needs, in the words of the legal complaint filed Tuesday, have been “warehoused” in hospitals when social workers don’t have anywhere else to put them.

According to the lawsuit, this is a problem the state could solve but has chosen not to.

Mitch Mirviss, a partner at the law firm Venable, is representing the plaintiffs in the case.

Mirviss: We are challenging the lack of sufficient supply of appropriate placements in the community, as well as a lack of appropriate therapeutic clinical interventions, emergency services, wraparound programs, etc., that would allow these children to be placed more readily in the community.

Sterner: Explain how this process works. Exactly how are these children ending up stuck in hospitals?

Baye: I’ll give you an example using one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. This plaintiff is a 13-year-old boy identified by the initials T.A, who, according to the legal complaint, has multiple developmental and mental health disabilities. T.A. is in the custody of the Montgomery County Department of Health and Human Services. In mid-November, he ended up at Sheppard Pratt, a psychiatric hospital, after an altercation on a school bus. Less than two weeks later, the medical staff cleared T.A. to be released. But social workers didn’t pick him up, and six months later, he is still there. The lawsuit says T.A. has been accepted to a residential treatment center in Florida and could go as early as next week, depending on when a bed becomes available.

Sterner: So what happens to T.A. in the meantime? What does six months living in a psychiatric hospital look like for kids like T.A.?

Baye: It’s important to remember that facilities like Sheppard Pratt are not set up for long-term care. That’s something that Leslie Seid Margolis, a managing attorney at Disability Rights Maryland, described when we spoke. Disability Rights Maryland is also a plaintiff in the case.

Margolis: While these kids are in the hospital or in the emergency room, they’re generally not receiving education. They don’t have access to school, they’re not allowed to go out. So one of the things we’re asking is that they have access to education, and if they can’t go to school, that they at least get tutoring.

Read more (and listen) at WYPR.

Maryland is one of nine states with more than 1,000 prison inmates who are serving time for crimes they committed as children, and one of just four states where that group accounts for at least 6% of the prison population, according to a report released Tuesday by the advocacy group Human Rights For Kids.

Of the 1,132 Maryland inmates incarcerated since childhood, nearly 20% are serving life sentences and another roughly 19% are serving sentences 40 years or longer, according to Tuesday’s report.

Maryland also has one of the largest racial disparities out of the 45 states whose data the group analyzed. More than 90% of the Maryland inmates incarcerated since childhood are people of color, and more than 80% are Black.

During a call with reporters, Human Rights for Kids founder and CEO James Dold said the practice of charging children in adult criminal courts became more prevalent during the 1990s.

“In 1995, a group of criminologists coined the term ‘superpredator’ to describe what they theorized was a new wave of children who were coming of age who are more violent and less remorseful than ever before,” Dold said. “This narrative led to a wave of draconian policies that were rooted in part by racism.”

States reacted by lowering the age at which children could be charged as adults, and in some cases, eliminating children’s access to juvenile courts.

The Human Rights For Kids Report finds that nationwide there are more than 32,000 people incarcerated for crimes they committed as children.

Read more (and listen) at WYPR.

When Baltimore City resident Jabriera Handy was 16 years old, she got in a fight with her grandmother. A few hours later, her grandmother died of a heart attack, apparently as a result of the fight.

Handy was charged with second-degree murder, second-degree assault and first-degree assault. When teenagers are charged with those crimes in Maryland, they are charged as adults and their cases proceed in the adult court system.

After 11 months in an adult jail, Handy went to court, two days before her 18th birthday. Worried that turning 18 could mean a worse sentence, Handy pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter, a lower-level charge that sent her case back to the juvenile system.

Handy testified before the state Senate’s Judicial Proceedings Committee Thursday in support of a bill that would require all cases involving juvenile defendants to begin in juvenile court. Under current Maryland law, there are 33 crimes that automatically send children to adult court. Handy is among a group of advocates who have been trying and failing to change that law for the last 13 years. Those advocates and their allies in the legislature hope that this year’s bill will finally succeed.

“When it comes to the prohibition on children contracting, the prohibition of children working, the prohibition on children’s smoking, drinking or voting, the prohibition as of last year on children marrying, we protect children from all of these things because we say you’re not ready to do that yet,” Sen. Jill Carter, a Baltimore City Democrat and the bill’s sponsor, told the committee Thursday. “But only in one area of the law do we say, ‘OK, because you are accused of something, because there is a mere allegation against you, we’re going to wipe out all this evidence that you’re a child — we’re not going to treat you as a child.’”

According to data from the Governor’s Office of Crime Prevention, Youth, and Victim Services between July 1, 2021 and June 30, 2022, 632 Maryland children were charged with crimes that automatically landed them in adult court. More than a third of those children were charged with illegal gun possession. Other common crimes included carjacking, assault, armed robbery and murder.

In contrast to Maryland, Virginia has only two crimes that automatically land a minor in adult criminal court: murder and aggravated malicious wounding, said Josh Rovner, director of youth justice at The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit that advocates for criminal justice reform.

He said eight states already start all juvenile cases in juvenile court.

“Per capita, only Alabama sends more of its kids into adult court based on the initial charge than we do,” Rovner told lawmakers.

In Maryland, the overwhelming majority — more than 80% — of children automatically charged as adults are Black.

Read more (and listen) at WYPR.

Democrat Wes Moore was sworn in Wednesday afternoon as Maryland’s first elected Black leader of the state’s highest office. In a recent interview, Moore spoke with WYPR about his history-making position, as well as his plans for education and Maryland schools.

Moore said knowing that he is making history as the state’s first Black governor is “humbling.”

“The history of it is not lost on me at all, particularly because I understand the history of this state,” the governor-elect said. “This is the state of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman and Thurgood Marshall.”

However, he also pointed to the broad spectrum of voters who supported him in the election.

“When we think about all the people who supported us, and truthfully all the people who did not support us, all their voices are going to matter in this, and I plan on and I’m excited to be their governor, too,” he said. “While I appreciate and I’m humbled by the history that we’re making, making history is not the assignment.”

Throughout that history-making campaign, Moore frequently turned to education as a key pillar in his platform.

During the interview, Moore said his philosophy on public schools differs from outgoing Gov. Larry Hogan’s in that he plans to work “in partnership” with teachers.

Policy-wise, Moore has a long wishlist, including a program that would encourage high school graduates to participate in a year of public service before going on to college or a job. He also hopes to expand access to public pre-kindergarten, recruit more teachers of color, and build out the state’s apprenticeship and trade programs.

“The only benchmark for a student should not be, well, did they get accepted to a four-year college?” Moore said. “That’s not the path for every student. That wasn’t my path.”

Moore earned an associate degree from Valley Forge Military College in 1998, and a bachelor’s degree three years later from Johns Hopkins University.

Moore acknowledges that many of his plans are similar to programs already under way through the school system reform plan known as the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future.

“There is a lot of core alignment, what we have with the Blueprint, so you will see in the budget that we are going to be presenting, we’re going to be making a historic downpayment on that, but we also know that in order for it to be effective, that we are going to have to implement this in partnership,” Moore said.

To help families with children too young for pre-K, Moore spoke during his campaign about needing to fix Maryland’s childcare system.

“We have to get ourselves to a point, to a state where we are fixing a childcare system that is ruptured and in a state of just utter disrepair, where we have literally had hundreds of childcare centers close since COVID,” Moore said, when asked to describe some specifics of his plan for childcare. “You cannot get an economy that is going to work if you still have a significant portion of the economy that cannot get back to work because we’re forcing them to choose.”

When the Maryland General Assembly convenes Wednesday, Democratic leaders plan to protect abortion rights and set up the state’s new recreational marijuana industry.

State Senate President Bill Ferguson and House Speaker Adrienne Jones described those and other priorities on WYPR’s Midday Tuesday.

After voters legalized recreational marijuana use in November, lawmakers have to create the infrastructure for the new industry.

Ferguson divided the task into three key parts.

First, the legislature needs to create a regulatory framework, including creating licenses for businesses that want to participate in the marketplace, in time for the market to launch July 1.

Delaying the launch of the new legal market increases the risks that the illegal market continues to thrive, Ferguson said.

Read more (and listen) at WYPR.

A federal judge has ruled that Catholic Relief Services, an international humanitarian aid organization based in Baltimore, has been discriminating against a gay employee by denying his husband health insurance.

When the employee, known in court records as “John Doe,” took the job as a data analyst for Catholic Relief Services in 2016, he was told his husband could get health insurance through the organization’s spousal benefits system, according to the legal documents.

“And then CRS reached out to him and said, oh, that was a mistake. We don’t cover same-sex spouses,” said Eve Hill, a partner at the law firm Brown Goldstein & Levy and one of several lawyers representing Doe.

CRS did initially provide the benefits to Doe’s husband, but after months of discussions between Doe and the nonprofit’s human resources department, the organization removed Doe’s husband from the health plan in October 2017.

Doe filed a complaint with the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission in 2018, followed by a lawsuit in 2020. Last week, Judge Catherine Blake at the U.S. District Court in Baltimore ruled in Doe’s favor. Citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, Blake wrote in her opinion that CRS’s refusal to insure Doe’s husband amounts to discrimination in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. CRS also violated the federal Equal Pay Act and the Maryland Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, Blake wrote.

Read more (and listen) at WYPR.

A recent audit of the state agency responsible for the foster care system and protecting children from abuse found widespread deficiencies — from kids in foster care going without medical services to abuse allegations going unchecked.

WYPR reporter Rachel Baye joined Nathan Sterner to discuss some of these findings.

Sterner:

The focus of this audit is the Social Services Administration, which is part of the state Department of Human Services and oversees all of local social services agencies. I understand this audit is a follow up from an audit done last year?

Baye:

Actually, the problems go back even further. The Office of Legislative Audits, which reports to the General Assembly, looked at the Social Services Administration back in 2017 and found 14 different problems. These ranged from inadequate monitoring of foster care providers to not making sure local social services departments were investigating allegations of child abuse in a timely fashion.

When the auditors went back last year, eight of those 14 problems still existed.

So this week, they released yet another audit looking at the six most significant remaining issues. Of those, the agency has still not fixed three, including the two you referenced: They are not making sure local social services agencies are following up on abuse allegations or are providing children in the foster care system with legally required services.

Read more (and listen) at WYPR.

Friday’s Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade has reverberations even in Maryland, where abortions have been legal for 30 years. To get a sense of the decision’s impact in the state, WYPR’s Rachel Baye spoke with Karen Nelson, CEO and president of Planned Parenthood of Maryland, on Thursday, just before the ruling. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Baye: You started to say that people in Maryland are worried. Tell me what the concerns are.

Nelson: We have access issues already in Maryland. Now, if other states lose access to abortion care, there’s a concern that our volumes are going to go high, with people traveling from other states to to get health care here within this state.

Baye: You mentioned access issues already in Maryland. Can you elaborate on that?

Nelson: Oh yeah. Two thirds of the counties in Maryland do not have abortion providers.

Baye: Are you able to provide medicinal abortions via telehealth in-state?

Nelson: Yes. There is a counseling session and you would have to qualify for no physical examination. So not everybody does, but if you do, then we can do this via telemedicine and you can get your pills by mail.

Read more (and listen) at WYPR.

Social worker Chris Yelen said he has already been assaulted twice on the job working in a maximum security unit over the past year inside the Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center, a state psychiatric facility in Jessup.

The most recent attack happened on May 5, as Yelen was leaving a conference room with a patient.

“Another patient just came up to me and started punching me in the face, in the neck, in the back, in the shoulders — punched me I don’t even know how many times,” Yelen recalled. “A patient had to get him off of me. There was no security presence that was there to get that patient off of me.”

Almost six weeks later, Yelen is not yet able to return to work, pending medical clearance. Even so, he is not sure he will ever want to go back.

“There’s times when I felt like I should be safe … working [in] a maximum security facility, but haven’t felt safe and haven’t been safe and have had these things occur,” he said. “That’s the part that scares me.”

The Maryland branch of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the union that represents Yelen and other Perkins workers, says assaults on both patients and staff there have become routine due to understaffing of security attendants.

Read more (and listen) at WYPR.