Maryland Targets Highest-in-Nation Racial Incarceration Gap
Black Marylanders make up 30% of the state’s population but 71% of those in its prisons, the nation’s highest racial incarceration gap. To address that imbalance, state Attorney General Anthony G. Brown (D) helped launch the Maryland Equitable Justice Collaborative (MEJC) in October 2023. The group presented its first report on March 16, 2025, making 18 recommendations in five areas targeted for improvement.
The first of those areas centered around “unnecessary” and “unneeded” policing that results in traffic stops for broken tail lights and citations for expired registrations, which are in turn caused more by poverty than criminality. Black people in Maryland, like those nationwide, are statistically overrepresented in the share of the population living in poverty. The report also faulted jurisdictions that send police to respond to mental health crises; policies that rely on families to divert their loved ones into treatment leave those with fewer resources at the mercy of the government, which does them no favors by withholding treatment and sending in the cops.
The second area needing improvement involved expanding alternatives to incarceration and reducing reliance on bail. Those whose poverty forces them to wait for trial in jail are subjected to a host of related penalties—lost employment, lost housing and even lost custody of children. That same lack of resources leaves them unable to hire effective counsel, so they often end up imprisoned for nonviolent offenses. Even when released on parole, they remain at risk of reincarceration for technical violations that have nothing to do with criminality.
Another area offers an easy chance for improvement by granting release to sick and aging prisoners. The same poverty that drives so much of the racial incarceration gap also leaves underrepresented defendants facing longer sentences. Which means targeting the elderly and sick for release will disproportionately benefit Black prisoners.
Recommended improvements in fourth area that the report identified were realized on April 4, 2025, when state lawmakers passed a “Second Look” law to allow prisoners who’ve served 20 years or more of a sentence to petition for sentence reduction. That option was already available to those sentenced as adults for crimes they committed as juveniles under 2021’s Juvenile Restoration Act, Md. Stat. § 6-235 and § 8-110. The new law does not apply to those sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, nor to sex offenders or those convicted of killing a cop, firefighter or paramedic.
State lawmakers have also begun to address the last area for improvement with SB 422, which would reduce the number of crimes for which juveniles are automatically tried as adults from 33 to about a dozen. In practice, most such cases get kicked back to juvenile court anyway, but changing the law would keep kids from waiting in jail while that process plays out over several weeks or months. See: Breaking the 71%: A Path Toward Racial Equity in the Criminal Legal System, MEJC (2025).
Additional sources: Maryland Matters, Washington Post
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