The media’s focus on youth crime in Maryland is intense and incessant. Not a day goes by without stories of children allegedly committing violent crimes leading local news broadcasts. The coverage is so focused on youth crime that it has become the rage of pundits and elected officials, including Maryland legislators.

This attention has an outsized impact in Maryland. A new report from the Sentencing Project analyzes hyperbolic and misleading coverage of crimes committed by children by six of Baltimore’s leading media outlets. This coverage, in Baltimore and beyond, dominated Maryland’s 2024 legislative session and led to regressive laws, including one that allows for the arrest of more young children. Notably, the legislature rolled back a 2022 law built on a years-long study by a commission comprising youth behavioral and legal experts, researchers, youth representatives, service providers and elected officials. In stark contrast, the 2024 law passed after a months-long media focus on youth crime.

Certainly, all crime is concerning. We share the common interests in public safety, accountability and the delivery of appropriate rehabilitative services that address the root causes that bring children into the criminal legal system. However, we also need to put crime in perspective and context. Research shows that children 10 to 17 years of age comprise only 5% of arrests in Baltimore. And yet, some declare that “youth crime” is “out of control.”

Through all the rhetoric and debate, one thing is clear: Maryland’s Black children and their families disproportionately bear the brunt and burdens of hyper-criminalization. Per capita, no state other than Alabama automatically charges more children as adults than Maryland. Despicably, Black children, who comprise about 31% of Maryland’s overall youth population, account for 81% of the children charged as adults.

The hyperfocus on “youth crime” feeds into a history that has hyper-criminalized and disposed of Black children by detaching them from the very construction of childhood. The racialization of childhood influenced the earliest days of the youth justice system, as Black children were deemed “unchildlike and dangerous.” These constructs, over time, led to South Carolina executing 14 years-young George Stinney in 1944, the youngest person in U.S. history killed in an electric chair (his conviction was vacated 70 years later).

They led to depictions that dehumanized Black children as “out of control,” from the “wilding” “wolf pack” that media ascribed to the Central Park Five (now the Exonerated Five) to the fearmongering forewarnings of “super-predators” in the mid-1990s.

These constructs continue to adultify Black boys and girls who are interpreted, portrayed and seen as older than their tender years, and less innocent than their white peers.

Black children are criminalized through all walks of life. Take schools for example. In the 2022-23 school year, Black students comprised 33% of Maryland’s overall student population but represented 58% of students suspended and expelled from school and nearly 57% of students arrested in school. Research has consistently shown that Black students do not misbehave more than their peers.

As Professor Kristin Henning details in her book “The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth,” white children enjoy the privilege of adolescence, while Black children are surveilled and criminalized for all aspects of adolescence, from clothing to hairstyles to friendships.

History has shown a comfort with criminalizing Black children. They are seen as bodies to be punished and incarcerated, rather than as children who deserve equitable educational opportunities and non-carceral interventions and services, which have proved to be effective at building children up rather than breaking them down.

Some policy-makers dismiss what studies have proven: Charging children as adults causes more harm and undermines public safety.

In the days ahead, we will continue to talk about the best ways to respond to Maryland’s children who have committed criminal acts and to bolster public safety. Our disagreements will be strong because we approach these issues from different perspectives and life experiences. Anchoring these conversations in historical context, truth, and data — not hyperbole — is necessary to meet the urgency of ending the hyper-criminalization of Black children and advancing policies that work.

All children must be seen, viewed and treated as children, receive the benefit of their adolescence and be provided the supports and services needed to overcome any challenges they may face.

Michael Pinard and Monique L. Dixon are the faculty director and executive director, respectively, of the Gibson-Banks Center for Race and the Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. The center examines and addresses historical and current racial inequalities within systems and institutions in Baltimore, Maryland and nationwide.