Baltimore, Maryland

---

• 1 out of 3 Maryland residents​ in state prison are from Baltimore City. 

• Maryland taxpayers spend​ $288M on corrections​ in Baltimore. This includes as much as $17 million to incarcerate people from a single community, Sandtown-Winchester/ Poplar Hill. 

• In Maryland, Black people constituted ​31% of state residents​, but 52% of people in jail and 69% of people in prison.  

• Since 1978, the Black incarceration rate has ​increased 7 percent​. In 2017, Black people were incarcerated at 4.5 times the rate of white people, and Native American people were incarcerated at 3.5 times the rate of white people. 

The J. DeWeese Carter Center (Carter), located on the eastern shore, is a maximum security committed placement center for girls. Carter is owned and operated by the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services (DJS/the Department) and has a DJS-rated housing capacity of 14 girls.​ ​

• African American youth represented 58% of total youth entries​ ​to Carter during the first quarter of 2019, compared to 45% during the same period in 2018. 

The number of women in Maryland’s jails has ​increased more than eightfold​, from 120 in 1970 to 1,000 in 2015. 

• The number of women in Maryland’s prisons has ​increased more than threefold​, from 244 in 1978 to 833 in 2017. 

Since 1980, the ​number of women in jail​ in Maryland has increased 462%, and the 

• number of women in prison has increased 264%. 

Nine out of 10 homicides (291) in the city were ​committed with firearms​. The number of nonfatal shootings in 2019, 771, was also higher than that seen in the past five years. violence, with more than ​300 homicides each year since 2015​.

 Last year there were 348 homicides, giving Baltimore the highest per capita rate among municipalities with at least 500,000 residents.

Violent crime rose by nearly 18 percent in the first five months of 2019 compared to the year before in the three central county precincts – Towson, Cockeysville and Parkville – according to police statistics. Nearly all can be attributed to ​domestic assaults​, which spiked by 68 percent.  

30 percent of children in Baltimore ​have Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) scores of 2 or more, meaning that they have experienced more than two incidences of events such as domestic violence, living with someone with an alcohol/drug problem, the death of a parent, or being a victim/witness of neighborhood violence.