Juvenile crime and the Maryland General Assembly

Here’s a startling line from a Capital News Service/Maryland Reporter story on juvenile crime on the Eastern Shore: “Cambridge Police Chief Justin Todd and [Cambridge Mayor Stephen] Rideout referred to the case of a child under 13 accused of stealing 11 cars in Dorchester County.”

Stealing 11 cars! And by complete coincidence, a 2022 Maryland law provides that persons under 13 can no longer be charged with nonviolent crimes, even felonies. Instead they and their families get diverted to social services and the like, assuming process is pursued against them at all.

It would be nice to think that was a solution.

In Dorchester County, where police say youth crime has spiked since the law went into effect in June 2022, law enforcement and community leaders are questioning whether the CINS process offers adequate options for interventions to address the reasons for youth crime, while allowing law enforcement to protect the public….

If a CINS case goes to court, a judge can order evaluations or services for youth and families, but courts have no means to enforce their decisions….

“The (Act) really ties the hands of everybody,” Todd said. “…Because you can mandate them to go to services, but if they come back to court a month later. Did you do the services? No. There’s no next step, and that makes it very difficult.”

Another recent Maryland law severely restricts police investigators from asking questions of juveniles without a lawyer present. State’s attorneys such as Charles Smith of Frederick County as well as police have consistently criticized both laws as contributing to a youth crime wave. Supporters of the laws have responded with misleading statistical defenses about how arrest and conviction numbers don’t bear out the popular sense of a wave of youth crime — although much of the point is that the crimes no longer result in conviction, or even to arrest if that seems futile.

Car theft can seriously disrupt the daily life as well as the finances of victims, making it harder to, for example, hold down a job. Pleading with a young criminal’s family to accept social services and counseling doesn’t seem like an adequate substitute for the rule of law.