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Two of Maryland’s top criminal justice leaders will hold a listening session in Baltimore Monday evening to hear from residents about how to address the mass incarceration of Black Marylanders.
The listening session hosted by Attorney General Anthony Brown and Public Defender Natasha Dartigue comes nearly two weeks after the pair announced a new coalition aimed at reducing mass incarceration.
The group of 39 organizations, called the Maryland Equitable Justice Collaborative, will listen to the ideas and experiences of Baltimore residents at the session, which is scheduled for Monday from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum on Pratt Street.
Dartigue and Brown highlighted mass incarceration as both a national problem and one that is specific to Maryland at the MEJC’s launch last month.
The Prison Policy Initiative reports that Black Marylanders make up only about 30% of the state’s population but account for more than 70% of the entire prison population in Maryland, a figure that the Attorney General’s Office described as “the largest percentage of imprisoned African Americans in the United States.”
White residents, by contrast, make up about 50% of Maryland’s population but less than a quarter of its prison population, according to the Prison Policy Initiative data from 2021. That data is collected from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau.
“MEJC will work to uplift marginalized communities and develop meaningful reforms that end the cycling of people through Maryland’s jails and prisons,” Dartigue said at the launch event.
According to the Attorney General’s Office, the MEJC represents a “historic partnership” between Maryland’s chief legal officer and the state’s Office of the Public Defender. The other groups participating in the MEJC organizations include government, nonprofit, private sector and community organizations.
The MEJC is set to meet quarterly and convene committees with focus areas ranging from juvenile justice reform, law enforcement policies, and criminal law and sentencing reform. The group will develop preliminary legislative recommendations for the upcoming 2024 session of the General Assembly and will produce a final report by early 2025.
Members of the public who wish to attend Monday’s listening session can register online. The meeting will not be livestreamed, but a recording will be shared afterward on the Attorney General’s Office’s Facebook page.
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