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.
Lamar said there were nine other teens in the gym on the day in early June when he arrived and six when he finally got a bed in a normal housing unit.
The hardest part about sleeping in the gym was actually sleeping, he said, in part because at least some of the lights in the gym remain on throughout the night. He would put his blanket over his head to try to block out the light.
He said his anxiety also contributed to his sleep issues during his stay in the gym.
“When I first got down here, they wasn’t giving me my medicine at all, so my anxiety was getting worse and I was hyper vigilant,” Lamar said. “So on top of the fact that I’m trying to go to sleep around a bunch of people I don’t know, they won’t even cut the light off so now that’s messing with my nerves, too.”
The crowding issues seem to pre-date the summer by several months at least. On Jan. 4, the YDC facility administrator testified in court that the detention center had 66 teens, at least six more than it’s meant to hold.
The Office of the Public Defender has been hearing from clients that they are sleeping in the YDC gym as far back as last October, according to Baltimore City public defender Brian Levy. Based on conversations with his clients and other public defenders’ conversations with their clients, he believes there have been as many as 21 teens sleeping in the facility’s gym at a time.