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Hundreds of children are being held in appalling conditions in the Baltimore City Detention Center and other adult jails around Maryland, Human Rights Watch charged in a report "No Minor Matter: Children in Maryland's Jails."

Detention centers around the state often lack adequate education and medical care, including mental health care. Youth in all of the facilities in the five counties visited by Human Rights Watch complained that they did not get enough to eat.

In many of Maryland's smaller jails, children are mixed in with adults, often sharing cells with them. The lack of separate juvenile housing violates international standards.

"Maryland should not be locking children up in these adult jails," said Michael Bochenek, Counsel to the Children's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch. "This practice violates the fundamental rights of the child."

The 169 page report, "No Minor Matter: Children in Maryland's Jails," found the worst conditions for children in the Baltimore City Detention Center. Juveniles are confined to dimly-lit, squalid cells crawling with cockroaches and rodents and subject to extreme temperatures. Violence between inmates is rampant and may include "shanks," or weapons fashioned from pieces of metal from air vents or old light fixtures. Some jail guards have condoned and even organized fights between youth, known as "square dances," which have resulted in serious injuries.

Maryland is one of forty states that have made it easier to try children as adults. As a consequence of the national trend to move more children into the criminal justice system, a growing number of children are held in adult facilities while they await trial.

The national crime rate for adolescents has actually fallen every year since 1993. "Treating children brutally is not going to help the crime rate," said Bochenek. "Children do not belong in jails with adults, no matter what crime they have committed."

Children in the Baltimore City Detention Center may be confined to cells in the disciplinary segregation section for as long as six months. Entire units may be subjected to collective punishments known as "lockdowns", where inmates are confined to their cells for weeks at a time, denied visits from family members and allowed out only for classes, and two or three showers per week.

One facility studied for the report, Prince George's County Correctional Center, had no educational programs at all for its juvenile detainees. Young inmates may spend up months in the center with no educational opportunities, in flagrant violation of state and federal law and international standards. In other facilities, the number of hours of classroom instruction frequently fell far short of the requirements of federal and state law.

Mental health services in Baltimore's jail are minimal to nonexistent, with no services specifically for juveniles. Although children in adult jails may be eight times more likely to commit suicide than their peers in juvenile detention centers, children in the Baltimore jail have no therapeutic groups or individual counseling. Inmates in crisis are placed in a mental health unit, where they are often kept naked, with nothing more than paper blankets to cover their bodies.

Children in adult facilities are often exposed to adult inmates or placed in the same unit with adults. Contrary to international guidelines, children may have daily contact with adults, or even share cells. One youth in the Baltimore City Detention Center told Human Rights Watch that adults detainees in his section continually harassed him by throwing excrement and urine into his cell. After complaints yielded no results, he resorted to telling guards that he was suicidal, and was moved to the psychiatric wing for several days.

Human Rights Watch called upon Maryland to end the practice of detaining children in adult detention facilities, and ensure that conditions of detention for youth comply with federal and state law and international standards.

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