Interview with Judge Andre Davis, Chair of the Commission on Juvenile Justice Reform and Emerging and Best Practices

The Commission on Juvenile Justice Reform and Emerging and Best Practices was created in 2024, when the General Assembly passed and Governor Moore signed House Bill 814.¹ That bill focused largely on reversing portions of the Juvenile Justice Reform Act of 2022, but authorizing the commission was a future-focused action. According to the commission’s homepage², it is charged with “evaluating programs and services for children that are delivered by State, local, and community-based agencies; examining emerging and effective practices; monitoring key juvenile justice system services, processes, and outcomes; and developing recommendations to strengthen programs and services for children.” The Youth Rights and Safety Hub (YRSH) spoke with the commission’s chair, former federal judge Andre M. Davis³, about its first year of work and what to expect going forward.

Youth Rights & Safety Hub (YRSH): Get us started by explaining what the commission is and what it does.

Andre Davis: The Commission on Juvenile Justice Reform and Emerging Best Practice was statutorily created by the General Assembly of Maryland. I wasn’t in the room when the sausage was made, but I think that the creation was to say, let’s see if we can’t step back and take a broader, more holistic approach and an analysis of the entire Maryland youth justice system. We have representation from every conceivable stakeholder involved in or affected by the youth justice system. So we have a sheriff. We have a police chief. We have state’s attorneys. We have the public defender. We have victim advocates. We have four legislators from the House and two people from the Senate. And we have this retired federal judge as the chair. So I think it’s a formula that holds promise.

YRSH: Who does it report to?

Andre Davis: As the chair, I was appointed by the president of the senate, the speaker of the house, and the governor. So when we make a recommendation, I believe we’re speaking to the people of Maryland. We’re talking to every policymaker in Maryland at whatever level. And specifically, we’re talking to the president of the Senate, the Speaker of the House, and every elected member of the General Assembly.

We’re staffed by the Governor’s Office of Crime Prevention and Policy (GOCPP), and one of the first things they helped us do is to distill from the various particularized mandates what we’re supposed to look at and make recommendations about. We created five work groups—and one of them was my creation, because there’s no such thing as a commission on youth justice that is not also concerned with preventing youth from becoming justice involved. My own view is the commission’s job is to examine the entire system bottom to top, inside out, and come up with data-driven, evidence-based best practices in the forms of recommendations.

YRSH: Can you give us a quick summary of the commission’s first report⁴?

Andre Davis: I had a very modest goal for the first report, which was first and foremost to demonstrate to the legislators and the people of Maryland the seriousness of purpose with which we were approaching our work. We set about to lay out the organization of the commission how we intend to go about our work. We described the five work groups. The first year we spent calling in both local and national experts in the area of youth criminal justice to make sure that all the commissioners had a certain minimum amount of information about youth justice. We wanted to make sure that we were all on the same page about some of the indisputable facts around youth involved in the justice system and youth more generally.

For example, one of our first presentations came from an excellent non-governmental organization called the Center for Law, Brain, and Behavior–full disclosure, I happen to be a member of the advisory board of that organization. They have taken ahold of knowledge that’s been derived over the last 25 to 30 years in the area of law and neuroscience, and they have marshaled resources to do just an extraordinary amount of work focused on brain development as it relates to the juveniles. They did a wonderful presentation about how we used to regard young people, what the new science tells us about developmentally appropriate approaches to young people, including young people in difficulty with the law, and what some of the best practices are that they’re seeing around the country. So that’s just an example that you’ll find in our initial report.

YRSH: The commission recently published its first set of recommendations⁵. Can you give a quick summary of what those were?

Andre Davis: For the last number of years, there have been a number of commissions and investigations here in Maryland looking at different aspects of the juvenile justice system. One commission’s work was hampered by the corona virus pandemic, of course, and that’s regrettable. But a lot of data was generated about what happens to children in the Maryland juvenile justice system.

Some of that data gave rise to the statutory changes that took place back in 2022, so our Procedures Work Group took a deep dive into this data about the violation that Maryland is consistently under [regarding] the federal Juvenile Justice Prevention Act. Under that act, children detained in the justice system must not be in proximity to adults when they are detained—there’s a so-called sight and sound separation. And Maryland has been a disaster for years in that regard. And it’s a serious violation: Maryland is so out of compliance that when statistical analyses of nationwide averages are calculated, Maryland’s data are excluded because we are such an outlier. And so when the work group took a close look, it discovered what others have already discovered: It is autocharging that puts children 15, 16, 17 into the adult criminal justice system rather than in the juvenile justice system.

What happens, very simply, is you have children charged with serious offenses who are detained within the criminal justice system, not the juvenile system. The criminal justice system, where judges are setting bail, oftentimes high bail, and oftentimes no bail because of the nature of the offense. And so those children are being held in these detention centers around the state as well as in DJS facilities. And what we learned is that when you get to the end of the process, maybe as high as 87% of the children who start their cases in adult court—and therefore are largely among the cohort detained in these facilities—never get an adult conviction.

So, if 85% of the children who are charged as adults automatically because of the nature of the offense, never get an adult conviction, why are they spending 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 months in close proximity to adult detainees in violation of federal law? Don’t you see that this adult charging is at best over inclusive? So that’s our first report.

We are calling for a change in the state’s law relating to automatic adult charging. There are 33 crimes for which children are automatically charged as adults, and it only takes one of these 33 to put you in adult court. And, by the way, some of those crimes include “attempted this” or “attempted that”. I’m a former prosecutor, and the law of “attempt” is about as malleable as you can make it. Any prosecutor worth their weight in sand can craft that charge. I’m not offering a critique for any particular prosecutor. I’m not even offering a critique about the practices of prosecutors generally. I’m offering a critique of how expansive this list of crimes is and I’m asking policymakers to examine the law in light of the consequences that we see at the end. If you’re not convicting, either because the case can’t be proven or because it’s dismissed, or because you end up back in juvenile court, it’s literally wasting $17 million a year that could be spent on providing the services to these children that they need.

YRSH: I think people understand the difference between children and adults, what they may not understand is the difference between a youth justice system and an adult criminal justice system. If you were on an elevator with someone and they asked, “Why wouldn’t we put kids in the adult system?” What would you tell them?.

Andre Davis: Americans are wedded to this idea of free will, of liberty, of individual responsibility. We know that children are different, but when you overlay our approach to criminal justice on children, our anachronistic, retributive, carceral approach to criminal justice wins out. Our criminal justice system focuses on not the human being who engaged in the behavior, but on the behavior that was engaged in and often the consequences—which, no question about it, are very important. But as Brian Stevenson loves to say, no one is the sum total of the worst thing they ever did.

Carjacking, for example, is a real concern. I’m concerned about it. The public is concerned about it. But if you look at a lot of carjackings, what you see is you see a group of kids, sometimes as young as 14, being “led” by an older person or sometimes an adult. So you have three or four kids who together commit an armed carjacking. A prosecutor is going to approach those facts by essentially saying because these 33 crimes include armed carjacking, all four of those kids are going to start out in the adult system. It takes a while to sit down with even a person of goodwill to say we need to individualize our approach to justice. Just because a kid is with three other kids and participates in activity that leads to a violent act, that’s not alone sufficient to throw that kid into the adult system.

The point is children are different. Even the Supreme Court of the United States recognizes children are different. They’re not as culpable as adults. They don’t make decisions as adults. We know that their brains aren’t fully developed in terms of executive function. So for all those reasons, we must treat children differently and we must increase the chances for children to develop beyond the worst thing they’ve ever done in their lives before they turn 18.

YRSH: You made reference earlier to creating a work group around prevention. I really would like to hear you speak about why you insisted on including that and what that looks like.

Andre Davis: I grew up in East Baltimore, and it was a tough neighborhood. I know what kind of kid I was and the difference between me sitting here today as a retired federal judge and the children who are today in the custody of the Department of Juvenile Services. The line is so thin, it’s just remarkable to me. I know what it takes to help children, especially Black children, especially Black boys, especially Black boys growing up in Maryland and in Baltimore in particular.

In my body I know—I live that history—that if the proper services, interventions, and resources are made available to the families and the communities where these families are, I know we can reduce the incidence of antisocial behavior on the part of children at risk. I was a child at risk because of where I grew up and the circumstances of my birth, and I’ve seen so much evidence over my career.

I want to see resources redirected so that the families of these kids and these kids themselves have a better chance early on. The research tells us if a Black boy in Baltimore—or anywhere, frankly—is not reading at grade level by fourth grade or fifth grade, that kid is doomed to end up in the criminal justice system. It’s just a fact of life. Unfortunately, the statistical significance of that is just through the roof.

So what we need are the very things that some politicians for years have been arguing for. Head Start, robust after-school programs, the community school movement that in many ways got started in Baltimore. These programmatic interventions for at-risk kids work. I know they work. And so to me, this commission to ignore prevention would be just unthinkable.

YRSH: How can the public pay attention to and support what you guys are doing?

Andre Davis: Number one, our meetings are available remotely. So I hope the public will tune in. I certainly hope that the commissioners are letting the public know what they’re doing.

I also hope when members of the public see these headlines—”16 year old arrested for this”, “14-year old does this”–I hope somewhere in their minds, they’ll say, “Gee, I wonder what the commission is doing about this,” rather than just accepting what’s coming from the media unquestioningly.

We’re not going to have ready answers for everything. But I think we can bring a voice of reason; we can speak the truth about not just the conduct of children, but also the humanity of children and why every child is entitled to be respected as a human being with dignity.

1. Juvenile Justice Reform and Emerging and Best Practices Commission 2025 Report State Government Article, Section 9-3502(h) (https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2024RS/bills/hb/hb0814E.pdf)

2. Commission on Juvenile Justice Reform & Emerging & Best Practices, Governor’s Office of Crime Prevention and Policy (GOCPP), (https://gocpp.maryland.gov/councils-commissions-and-workgroups/juvenile-justice-reform-and-emerging-and-best-practices/https://gocpp.maryland.gov/councils-commissions-and-workgroups/juvenile-justice-reform-and-emering-and-best-practices/).

3. Biography of Judge Andre M. Davis, United States District Court, Court of Maryland (https://www.mdd.uscourts.gov/biography-judge-andre-m-davis)

4. Juvenile Justice Reform and Emerging and Best Practices Commission 2025 Report: State Government Article, Section 9-3502(h), October 2025 (https://gocpp.maryland.gov/wp-content/uploads/SG9-3502h_2025.pdf)

5. Maryland’s JJDPA Compliance Crisis: Children in Adult Detention, October 2025. (https://gocpp.maryland.gov/wp-content/uploads/Marylands-JJDPA-Compliance-Crisis-Children-in-Adult-Detention-COMMISSION-APPROVED-.docx.pdf)