Every criminal defense lawyer who has practiced in Maryland’s juvenile courts has watched the same scene play out. A seventeen-year-old stands before a judge charged with something genuinely serious—a shooting, a sexual assault, a robbery that put someone in the hospital. The child is not a hardened criminal. He is a child, with a childhood behind him that explains a great deal and excuses none of it. He has needs that are visible to everyone in the room: mental health treatment, a family that functions, a reason to get up in the morning, and the sustained attention of an adult who will not disappear.

The juvenile court can provide every one of those things. It has the service capacity, the authority over the family, the clinical infrastructure, and the disposition tools. What it does not have is time. Under Maryland law, the juvenile court’s jurisdiction ends when the child turns twenty-one. On his twenty-first birthday, whatever the court has built collapses. The probation ends. The services end. The supervision ends. The leverage ends.

So the judge is presented with a choice that is not really a choice. He can keep the case in juvenile court, where the child will receive real help on a leash that runs out in three or four years—which, for a seventeen-year-old charged with a violent felony, everyone in the courtroom understands to be inadequate. Or he can let the case go to adult court, where the sentence will be long enough to mean something but the services will not exist, the family will not be reachable, and the young man will emerge at thirty with a felony conviction, a prison record, and none of the skills that would have kept him out in the first place.

That is the cliff at twenty-one. It is not a philosophical problem. It is an architectural one. Maryland has built a juvenile system that is good at rehabilitation and bad at duration, and an adult system that is good at duration and bad at everything else, and it has given judges no way to combine them.

Roughly half the states in this country have solved that problem. They did it through what the literature calls blended sentencing or blended jurisdiction—statutory schemes that permit a court to impose a juvenile disposition and an adult sentence in the same case, with the adult sentence suspended so long as the young person complies. Minnesota has run such a system since 1995. Texas has run one since 1987. Kansas, Montana, Michigan, Ohio, Vermont, and others have their own versions. These are not experimental. They have been operating for three decades, and they have been studied.

This memorandum argues that Maryland should join them, and it argues for a specific design. But it begins with a concession that most advocacy pieces on this subject refuse to make, and that refusal is precisely why they fail to persuade.

A. What This Memorandum Does Not Claim

Blended jurisdiction is not a cure for juvenile crime. The empirical record on that question is mixed at best, and in some studies it is flatly discouraging. A three-year follow-up of determinately sentenced youth in Texas found that fifty percent of both the blended-sentence group and the comparison group were rearrested at least once. Research on blended-sentenced juvenile homicide offenders found that a majority were rearrested for a felony within ten years of release. Minnesota’s own courts, having studied their Extended Jurisdiction Juvenile program, identified racial disparity in who gets selected for it and concluded that neither the blended sentence nor adult certification was reliably reaching the population each was designed for.

Anyone who tells the General Assembly that a blended system will reduce recidivism is overselling, and will be caught overselling. This memorandum does not make that argument.

B. What This Memorandum Does Claim

The argument here is narrower and, I think, considerably more durable. It has three parts.

First, the twenty-one-year cutoff is arbitrary. It is not derived from any finding about adolescent development, desistance from crime, or the length of time supervision needs to run to be effective. It is a historical artifact of the age of majority. The developmental literature that Maryland’s own reform advocates rely on—the research showing that the adolescent brain continues maturing into the mid-twenties—points in exactly the opposite direction from a twenty-one-year cliff. If eighteen is too young to be treated as a finished adult, twenty-one is too young to be released from all structure.

Second, the cliff distorts judicial decision-making in a direction that harms children. When a judge concludes that a case requires more than three years of accountability, the only tool available is transfer to adult court. Transfer is therefore being used not because the adult system is better suited to the child, but because it is the only system with a clock long enough. That is a bad reason to send a seventeen-year-old to the Division of Correction, and it is happening in Maryland right now.

Third, the value of a blended system lies in what it lets the court hold, not in what it promises to fix. A blended sentence gives a judge the ability to keep a serious case inside the forum that has the services, while holding a real consequence over the young man’s head for as long as it takes. It converts the transfer question from a one-time, irreversible gamble made at age seventeen on incomplete information into an ongoing, revisable judgment made over years by a judicial officer who actually knows the person in front of him.

That is an accountability argument, not a rehabilitation argument. It should be made as one.

C. The Proposal in Brief

What follows is a proposal in eight components. Each is drawn from a working statute in another state, or from research with an identifiable evidence base, or from a structure Maryland already possesses and would simply be extending. The eight are:

Extended jurisdiction with a stayed adult sentence. A designated proceeding in which the juvenile court imposes both a juvenile disposition and an adult sentence, the latter stayed on conditions, with court jurisdiction extending to age twenty-five and, on written findings, to twenty-eight.

Narrow, written eligibility. Offense and age thresholds specified by statute, with a clear-and-convincing burden on the State at designation—not a general grant of discretion.

Specified revocation triggers. The statute must say, in advance and in writing, what conduct exposes the young person to execution of the adult sentence.

A graduated response ladder. A statutory menu of intermediate sanctions, so that a violation does not present the court with an all-or-nothing choice between doing nothing and imposing years in prison.

An exhaustion requirement. Before the State may move to execute the adult sentence, the supervising officer must certify in writing which graduated sanctions were attempted and why they failed.

A standing magistrate tier. Regular, frequent review before a judicial officer assigned to the case for its duration, on the problem-solving court model, with exceptions preserved to a circuit court judge.

Specialized clinical supervision. A dedicated transition-age caseload staffed by clinically trained officers at reduced ratios—not the general probation pool.

The Maryland Youth Works Corps. A state-operated paid employment program in public works, infrastructure, construction trades, and municipal services, available by court order as a condition of the juvenile disposition.

Sections II and III below establish where Maryland currently stands and why the problem is real. Sections IV through VI survey the states that have blended systems and report honestly on what has been learned from them. Section VII sets out the eight components in detail with their statutory models. Section VIII addresses the work component separately, because it is the newest of the eight and raises legal questions the others do not. Section IX takes on the objections. Section X states the ask.

II. Where Maryland Stands After the 2026 Session

Any proposal to the General Assembly has to begin by acknowledging what the General Assembly just did. The 2026 session produced the most significant restructuring of Maryland’s juvenile charging law in a decade, and a proposal that ignores it will be dismissed as uninformed.

A. Senate Bill 323 and the Presumption Shift

Senate Bill 323 of the 2026 Regular Session, the Youth Charging Reform Act, was sponsored by Senator William C. Smith, Jr. It passed the Senate 32–12 and the House 92–39 on April 6, 2026, and was signed by Governor Moore on May 26, 2026, becoming Chapter 609 of the 2026 Laws of Maryland. Its principal provisions take effect October 1, 2026; a set of confinement provisions is delayed to October 1, 2029. Section 2 of the Act makes it prospective only—it has no effect on prosecutions or delinquency proceedings arising from acts committed before the effective date.

The Act’s central move is to strike a group of offenses from the list at Courts and Judicial Proceedings § 3-8A-03(d)(4) that automatically excludes sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds from juvenile court jurisdiction. Removed from that list, and therefore now originating in juvenile court:

Criminal Law § 3-202 — first-degree assault

Public Safety §§ 5-133, 5-134, and 5-138 — possession of a regulated firearm, unlawful sale or transfer, and possession of a stolen regulated firearm

Criminal Law § 4-203 — wear, carry, or transport of a handgun

Criminal Law § 5-621 — use of a firearm in a drug trafficking crime

Criminal Law § 5-622 — possession of a firearm after a disqualifying conviction

The practical significance is a reversal of burden and posture. Before October 1, a sixteen-year-old charged with carrying a handgun began in adult court, and the defense bore the burden of persuading a circuit court judge on a reverse-waiver motion under Criminal Procedure § 4-202 that transfer down was in the interest of the child or society. After October 1, the same case begins in juvenile court, and the State must move up under Courts and Judicial Proceedings § 3-8A-06, carrying the burden of showing that the child is an unfit subject for juvenile rehabilitative measures against five factors the court must address on the record.

The volume involved is not trivial. Legislative fiscal analysis reported that in calendar year 2025, 303 youth were charged as adults for handgun and firearm violations, of whom 211 were ultimately transferred down to juvenile court, and 204 were charged as adults with first-degree assault, of whom 115 were transferred down. In other words, the great majority of these cases were ending up in juvenile court anyway—after months of adult-court detention. The same analysis reported that in fiscal 2025, as much as sixty-eight percent of the Department of Juvenile Services pre-disposition population consisted of youth charged as adults, whose average length of stay was 147 days, compared with 27 days for youth whose cases originated in juvenile court.

B. What Senate Bill 323 Did Not Change

Three points matter for present purposes.

First, the reverse waiver statute itself is substantively untouched. Criminal Procedure § 4-202 retains the same preponderance standard, the same “interest of the child or society” language, the same fourteen-to-seventeen age window, and the same bar—including the bar where the child has a prior conviction in an unrelated excluded case, and the bar for first-degree murder charged against a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old.

Second, a substantial list of offenses still originates in adult court. The fourteen-and-over exclusion for any crime punishable by life imprisonment survives at § 3-8A-03(d)(1)—notwithstanding some press coverage during the session suggesting otherwise, the committee amendments restored that provision. So does the sixteen-and-over list covering abduction, kidnapping, second-degree murder, manslaughter other than involuntary, second-degree rape, robbery and attempted robbery, third-degree sexual offense under Criminal Law § 3-307(a)(1), Public Safety § 5-203, carjacking and armed carjacking, attempted second-degree murder, attempted second-degree rape, and Criminal Law §§ 4-204, 4-404, and 4-405. So does the exclusion for a child with a prior adult felony conviction who is alleged to have committed a new felony.

Third—and this is the point of this memorandum—Senate Bill 323 did nothing whatever about duration. It moved cases into the juvenile system. It did not extend the juvenile system’s clock. Every one of the handgun and first-degree assault cases now landing in juvenile court is subject to the same twenty-one-year termination of jurisdiction that applied before. The Act has therefore made the cliff problem considerably more acute, by routing into the juvenile system precisely the older, more serious cases for which three years of supervision is least adequate.

The Act also added a new mandatory detention provision at Courts and Judicial Proceedings § 3-8A-15(b)(4): an intake officer must authorize pre-hearing detention where the child is sixteen or older and accused of a handgun violation under Criminal Law § 4-203 or a crime of violence under Criminal Law § 14-101. And it rewrote § 3-8A-16, effective October 1, 2029, to bar sight-or-sound contact between children and incarcerated adults and to prohibit holding a child awaiting trial or convicted in an adult correctional facility, with a narrow six-hour processing carve-out. Related amendments to Criminal Procedure § 4-202(h), also effective in 2029, repeal the capacity and risk-of-harm exceptions to holding a child in a secure juvenile facility pending a transfer determination.

Finally, beginning October 1, 2027, the Department of Juvenile Services and the Governor’s Office of Crime Prevention and Policy must report annually to the Commission on Juvenile Justice Reform and Emerging and Best Practices and to the General Assembly on waiver and reverse-waiver petitions filed, granted, and denied; lengths of stay; time spent in detention awaiting a § 3-8A-06 determination; youth held with adults; and sight-and-sound violations under the federal Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act. That reporting stream is directly relevant to the proposal here, and Section X returns to it.

C. The 2024 Act and the Back End

The governing framework on juvenile punishment and reach remains House Bill 814 of the 2024 session, the Juvenile Law Reform Act, Chapter 735. Three of its features bear on this proposal.

It extended the Department of Juvenile Services’ jurisdiction downward, from thirteen to ten, for firearms offenses, motor vehicle theft, aggravated animal cruelty, and third-degree sexual offense. It lengthened probation: misdemeanor terms from six months to one year, felony terms from one year to two, with extension to as much as four years on good-cause findings, and authority on a violation to extend a misdemeanor term to two years. And it compressed the intake window from twenty-five days to fifteen business days.

The direction of the 2024 Act is worth naming plainly, because it complicates the standard narrative. Maryland did not simply soften. It extended the system’s reach downward in age and lengthened its supervisory grip, while the 2026 Act shifted the forum default in the child’s favor. The composite is a system with a friendlier front door and a heavier back end—but still one that stops dead at twenty-one.

III. The Judge’s Dilemma

Consider a case of a kind that comes through Maryland courts every year. A seventeen-year-old is charged with a sexual offense against a small child. He has significant developmental and mental health impairments—not psychosis, not anything that would support a plea of not criminally responsible, but a genuine, documented impairment in social reasoning and impulse regulation. Every clinician who evaluates him says the same thing: with intensive, sustained, structured treatment, his risk can be managed. Nobody will say his risk can be eliminated, and nobody will say when, if ever, it will be safe to stop watching.

The juvenile court has the treatment. The juvenile court does not have four years, let alone eight. When he turns twenty-one, everything stops—not because a clinician has said he is safe, and not because a judge has found that supervision is no longer warranted, but because the calendar says so.

The prosecutor knows this. The judge knows this. And so the pressure in that case runs entirely toward the adult system, where a suspended sentence and a long probationary tail are available. The child goes to adult court not because adult court will do anything for him— it will not—but because it is the only forum that can keep hold of him.

This is the dilemma in its purest form, and it has three costs.

It produces transfers that nobody actually believes in. The transfer decision under § 3-8A-06 is supposed to turn on the child’s amenability to treatment. When duration is doing the work instead, the statutory findings become a formality performed over a decision made on other grounds.

It forces an irreversible judgment at the worst possible moment. Transfer is decided at the front of the case, when the court knows the least. Whether a seventeen-year-old will respond to treatment is a question that is answerable at twenty, and not at seventeen. A blended system defers that judgment until the evidence exists.

It wastes the state’s investment. Maryland spends real money on juvenile services. When a young man ages out at twenty-one in the middle of a treatment sequence that is working, the state has purchased a partial course of care and then discarded it.

The prosecutorial perspective on this point is not hostile, and it is worth quoting the substance of an account published in the journal of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association. Two co-defendants, close in age, were charged in the same incident. One remained in the juvenile system on determinate-sentence probation and was intensively monitored. Over the course of that supervision he graduated from high school, began college coursework online, completed inpatient drug treatment, received individual trauma-focused therapy, participated in court-ordered family counseling—the juvenile court having authority to impose conditions on the family, which the adult court does not—and finished his community service. The seventeen-year-old co-defendant went to adult court. His probation conditions included referrals for evaluation, and he was responsible for paying for them himself.

That contrast is the entire argument in miniature, and it was written by prosecutors.

IV. Blended Jurisdiction: What It Is, and Who Has It

The term “blended sentencing” covers several distinct statutory arrangements, and precision matters here, because the models differ sharply in what they accomplish. The typology in general use was developed by the National Center for Juvenile Justice and identifies five forms.

A. The Five Models

Juvenile-exclusive blend. The juvenile court imposes either a juvenile sanction or an adult sanction — one or the other, not both.

Juvenile-inclusive blend. The juvenile court imposes both simultaneously. The adult sentence is suspended or stayed, and executes only on violation or revocation. This is the model at issue in this memorandum.

Juvenile-contiguous blend. The juvenile court imposes a juvenile sanction that continues past the age of extended jurisdiction, at which point a procedure is invoked to transfer the case to the adult correctional system.

Criminal-exclusive blend. The adult criminal court, having convicted, may impose either a juvenile or an adult sanction.

Criminal-inclusive blend. The adult criminal court imposes both, on the same suspended-adult-sentence logic.

The distinction between the juvenile-side and criminal-side models is not cosmetic. Criminal-side blends begin with an adult prosecution, an adult conviction, and all the collateral consequences that attach to one. Juvenile-side blends keep the case in juvenile court, with a delinquency adjudication rather than a conviction, unless and until the young person defaults. For Maryland’s purposes the juvenile-inclusive model is the right one, for the simple reason that it preserves the juvenile disposition as the operative outcome and treats the adult sentence as contingency rather than destination.

B. How Many States

Blended sentencing is not unusual and it is not new. Roughly half of state legislatures enacted some form of it, most during the wave of juvenile justice legislation in the 1990s. Surveys of state law count on the order of ten states with exclusive blends and seven with inclusive blends on the juvenile side, with additional states operating criminal-side variants. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention maintains a current inventory of juvenile-court blended sentencing provisions organized by offense and minimum-age criteria.

The point for Maryland is that adopting a blended structure would not be an experiment. It would be joining a well-populated field with three decades of operating experience, published evaluations, and—crucially—a documented set of implementation failures to avoid.

V. The State Survey

What follows is not exhaustive. It covers the five statutes that supply the components of the Maryland proposal, plus brief notes on others.

A. Minnesota — Extended Jurisdiction Juvenile

Minnesota’s Extended Jurisdiction Juvenile designation, Minn. Stat. § 260B.130, is the flagship of the juvenile-inclusive model and the closest existing analogue to what Maryland should build.

A child is eligible if he was at least fourteen at the time of the offense and the offense would support adult certification. There are three routes into EJJ status: a certification hearing at which the court designates the proceeding as EJJ rather than certifying the child up; a presumptive route where the child was sixteen or seventeen and the alleged offense carries a mandatory minimum term of incarceration or is any felony in which a firearm was used; and designation on the prosecutor’s motion, where the State must show by clear and convincing evidence that designation is warranted.

On adjudication or plea, the court is required to do two things: order one or more juvenile dispositions, and impose an adult criminal sentence under the state sentencing guidelines, with execution of that sentence stayed on the conditions that the child not violate the juvenile disposition and not commit a new offense. Juvenile court jurisdiction continues to the twenty-first birthday. Revocation proceeds under Rule 19.11 of the Minnesota Rules of Juvenile Delinquency Procedure.

The framing used by the 1994 task force that recommended the statute is worth borrowing: the design gives the child one last chance at success in the juvenile system, with the threat of adult sanctions as the incentive not to reoffend. That is exactly the leverage argument advanced in Section I above.

B. Texas — Determinate Sentencing

Texas took a different route to the same destination, and it is instructive because Texas faces a more severe version of Maryland’s cliff. Texas juvenile court jurisdiction attaches where the offender was under seventeen at the time of the offense, and an ordinary juvenile disposition can hold the young person only to his nineteenth birthday. That is a two-year window for a seventeen-year-old—worse than Maryland’s.

Determinate sentencing is the statutory answer. For an enumerated list of serious offenses against persons—selected cautiously by the Legislature when the scheme was enacted—the juvenile court may impose a determinate sentence that begins in the custody of the Texas Juvenile Justice Department and may be transferred to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice for a term of up to forty years. The original ceiling was thirty years. The petition must be filed in juvenile court before the young person turns eighteen. There is also a habitual-conduct provision, with disposition ranges keyed to felony degree—up to forty years for a first-degree felony, twenty for a second, ten for a third.

Texas also demonstrates that a blended framework need not mean incarceration. Determinate-sentence probation is available, and it is the vehicle in the co-defendant account described in Section III—intensive monitoring in the community, with a forty-year sentence in the background.

C. Kansas — Extended Jurisdiction Juvenile Prosecution

Kansas operates a juvenile-inclusive blend at K.S.A. § 38-2364. The provision Maryland should study is the revocation procedure. On a motion to revoke the stay of execution of the adult sentence, the court must hold a hearing at which the juvenile offender is entitled to be heard and to be represented by counsel, and the court may act only if it finds by a preponderance of the evidence that the conditions were violated. Burden, standard, hearing, and counsel are all specified on the face of the statute rather than left to rule or practice.

D. Montana — The Graduated Revocation Menu

Montana Code Annotated § 41-5-1605 is, for Maryland’s purposes, the single most valuable statute in the survey, because it solves the problem that has caused the most trouble everywhere else.

Where the court finds by a preponderance that the conditions of the stay were violated or that the youth committed a new offense, it must provide a written statement of the evidence relied on and the reasons for revocation, and it must then choose among three options:

continue the stay and place the youth on probation;

impose one or more fresh juvenile dispositions, if the youth is under eighteen; or

order execution of the adult sentence.

The statute directs credit for time served under the prior disposition. And it specifies the consequence of the third option: on execution, the case transfers to district court, extended jurisdiction status terminates, and youth court jurisdiction ends.

That three-option menu is the difference between a workable system and an unworkable one. Without it, a violation hearing presents the court with a binary—excuse the conduct or send the young man to prison—and courts faced with that binary will overwhelmingly choose to excuse, right up until the moment they do not, at which point the response is wildly disproportionate to the triggering conduct. Montana’s menu is graduated response written into the code.

E. Nebraska — The Exhaustion Requirement

Nebraska Revised Statute § 43-286.01 supplies a mechanism Maryland should copy directly. Before formal revocation proceedings are instituted, the probation officer must submit a written report to the county attorney and to the juvenile’s counsel outlining the nature of the violation—and that report must include a statement of why graduated response sanctions were not used or were ineffective.

This is a forcing function. It makes the ladder mandatory in practice rather than aspirational, and it creates a written record that defense counsel can test and that appellate courts can review. It costs nothing.

F. Others

Michigan operates a juvenile-inclusive blend along the same general lines. Vermont has been described as technically juvenile-inclusive since 1998, though with the unusual feature that adult criminal court judges play the central decision-making role. Ohio’s Serious Youthful Offender scheme has been studied by the National Center for State Courts. One finding from that research is worth flagging for Maryland: in the counties studied, the ratio of serious youthful offender designations to conventional adjudications was on the order of 205 to 1. Blended designations are rare events. That has budgetary implications, addressed in Section IX.

VI. What the Evidence Shows—and What It Does Not

This section is the one that most advocacy on this subject omits, and omitting it is a mistake. A legislator who is handed a one-sided account and then discovers the contrary findings will discount everything else in the document.

A. The Favorable Finding

The Minnesota Judicial Branch published a study in 2002—described at the time as the first of its kind—which found that offenders sentenced under Extended Jurisdiction Juvenile, receiving both a juvenile disposition and a stayed adult prison sentence, were less likely to reoffend than offenders sentenced as conventional juveniles or certified as adults. That is a real finding from a credible source, and it is the strongest single piece of evidence in favor of the model.

B. The Unfavorable and Complicating Findings

A subsequent Minnesota report, Blended Sentencing in Minnesota: On Target for Justice and Public Safety?, is considerably more critical, and its criticisms are the ones Maryland must design against.

It found that race influenced the selection process—which youth were routed to EJJ, which to certification, which to conventional juvenile handling—and described that influence as a problem requiring remediation. It found that neither EJJ nor adult certification was effectively targeting its intended population. It documented substantial geographic variation across counties. And it concluded that it was timely to reconsider whether the existing configuration of dispositional alternatives was serving the interests of juveniles, of the system, or of public safety.

On recidivism specifically, the Texas evidence is a wash. An analysis of determinately sentenced youth followed for three years after release from institutionalization found that fifty percent of both the determinate-sentence group and the comparison group were rearrested at least once. Research on blended-sentenced juvenile homicide offenders found that a majority were rearrested for a felony within ten years post-incarceration, with certain institutional metrics significantly increasing that risk. Earlier work assessing sentencing strategies in Texas found that determinately sentenced youth and transferred youth both received longer terms of incarceration than ordinary juvenile processing would have produced—but that the picture changed once actual time served was taken into account.

C. The Drafting Lesson

There is a further body of criticism that goes to statutory design rather than outcomes, and it is directly actionable. A law review analysis of Minnesota’s EJJ revocation practice—Extended Jurisdiction Juvenile Prosecutions: To Revoke or Not to Revoke—documents a case in which a young woman received an EJJ disposition and, because the statute was new and its terms unspecified, nobody involved could say what she had to do to stay out of trouble or what offenses were serious enough to trigger the adult sentence. The prosecutor was unclear on the point.

That is a drafting failure with constitutional dimensions. A young person subject to a stayed prison sentence is entitled to know, in advance, what conduct will cause it to be executed. Maryland should not repeat it.

D. What Follows from All This

The honest synthesis is this. Blended jurisdiction does not reliably reduce reoffending relative to the alternatives, and no one should tell the General Assembly that it does. What the evidence supports is narrower: that a blended structure gives courts a jurisdictional tool they otherwise lack, that at least one credible study found favorable recidivism results, that the recurring failure modes are disparate selection and vague revocation triggers, and that both failure modes are addressable by careful drafting.

The case for Maryland therefore does not rest on a promise of reduced crime. It rests on the proposition that a judge confronting a serious case involving a seventeen-year-old should have a third option, and that the third option should be designed with the benefit of thirty years of other states’ mistakes.

VII. The Maryland Proposal

Component One: Extended Jurisdiction with a Stayed Adult Sentence

Maryland should create a designated proceeding—call it Extended Juvenile Jurisdiction, on the Minnesota nomenclature—in which the juvenile court, on adjudication or admission, imposes both a juvenile disposition and an adult sentence, with execution of the adult sentence stayed on conditions.

Jurisdiction under the designation should extend to age twenty-five as a matter of course, and to age twenty-eight on written findings by the court that the additional period is necessary for the completion of treatment, the protection of the public, or both, with the finding subject to review at intervals of not less than annually. The current termination at twenty-one, under Courts and Judicial Proceedings § 3-8A-07, would be displaced for designated cases only.

The choice of twenty-five and twenty-eight is not arbitrary. Twenty-five aligns with the developmental literature on which Maryland’s own juvenile justice reforms have relied and with the eighteen-to-twenty-five “emerging adult” category around which specialized supervision programs in other jurisdictions are organized. Twenty-eight provides the additional runway for the small number of cases—the developmentally impaired seventeen-year-old sex offense case in Section III is the paradigm—in which a decade of structured accountability is what the clinical picture actually calls for.

Component Two: Narrow, Written Eligibility

The Minnesota experience is unambiguous on this point: a broad grant of designation discretion produces disparate selection. Maryland should specify eligibility on the face of the statute.

The recommended structure: designation available only where the child was at least fourteen at the time of the offense and the alleged act would constitute a crime of violence under Criminal Law § 14-101 or an offense presently enumerated in Courts and Judicial Proceedings § 3-8A-03(d), or an offense removed from that subsection by Chapter 609 of 2026. The State should bear the burden at designation by clear and convincing evidence—the Minnesota standard—and the court should be required to state its findings on the record. Designation should be available on the State’s motion or, importantly, on the child’s motion, since for a child facing transfer under § 3-8A-06 the designation is the more favorable outcome and the defense should be able to seek it.

The statute should further require the Department of Juvenile Services to report designation data annually by jurisdiction, offense, age, and race. If Maryland is going to adopt a mechanism that has produced disparate selection everywhere it has been tried, it should build the disparity monitoring into the statute rather than discovering the problem fifteen years later, as Minnesota did.

Component Three: Specified Revocation Triggers

The statute must state what exposes the young person to execution of the stayed sentence. The recommended formulation limits execution to: (a) a new adjudication or conviction for a crime of violence or a felony; (b) absconding from supervision for a specified period; or (c) a pattern of technical violations that has persisted after the graduated sanctions in Component Four have been imposed and documented.

Every other violation is handled on the ladder. This is the direct answer to the failure documented in the Loyola analysis, and it is also the answer to the objection that a blended system is merely a slower pipeline to adult prison.

Component Four: A Graduated Response Ladder

Maryland should adopt the Montana menu, adapted. On a finding by a preponderance that conditions have been violated, the court must issue a written statement of the evidence relied on and the reasons for its decision, and may:

continue the stay, with or without modified conditions;

continue the stay with a short, defined period of confinement in a juvenile facility—the analogue of the technical-violation caps Maryland already applies to adult probationers under Criminal Procedure § 6-223, which limits confinement for first, second, and third technical violations to fifteen, thirty, and forty-five days respectively;

impose one or more additional or modified juvenile dispositions;

extend the period of extended jurisdiction, within the statutory ceiling; or

order execution of the adult sentence, but only on a trigger specified under Component Three.

Credit for time served under any prior disposition should be mandatory, as it is in Montana. And, following Montana, the statute should specify what happens on execution: transfer to the circuit court, termination of the extended jurisdiction designation, and termination of juvenile court jurisdiction.

The parallel to Criminal Procedure § 6-223 is worth emphasizing in any presentation to the General Assembly. Maryland already accepts the principle of graduated, capped responses to technical violations—it enacted it in the Justice Reinvestment Act and has lived with it for a decade. Component Four is not a new idea in Maryland law. It is an existing Maryland idea applied to a longer supervision term.

Component Five: An Exhaustion Requirement

Before the State may move for execution of the adult sentence, the supervising officer should be required to file a written report—served on the State’s Attorney and on counsel for the young person—setting out the nature of the violations and stating specifically which graduated sanctions were imposed, when, and why they were ineffective. This is Nebraska’s § 43-286.01 mechanism.

It is administratively trivial and substantively powerful. It ensures the ladder is climbed rather than skipped, it produces a reviewable record, and it gives the court something concrete to evaluate at the most consequential hearing in the case.

Component Six: A Standing Magistrate Tier

None of the foregoing works without frequent judicial contact. A graduated response system administered by a judge who sees the young man twice a year is a graduated response system in name only.

Maryland does not need to create a new judicial office to solve this. Title 11 of the Maryland Rules already provides for referral of juvenile causes, including delinquency matters, to a standing magistrate, who makes findings of fact and recommendations subject to exceptions to a circuit court judge. Practitioners of long standing will recall these officers as masters; the title was changed to magistrate, but the function—and, as a practical matter, the finality of most recommendations—is what it has always been. (Title 11 was restyled and renumbered in recent years; the specific rule citation should be confirmed against the current volume before any bill is drafted.)

What the statute should add is a standing referral for extended-jurisdiction cases, with these features: the same magistrate assigned for the duration of the designation, so that the judicial officer accumulates knowledge of the person rather than reading a file; a required review calendar—monthly during the first year of community supervision, no less than quarterly thereafter, with authority to reduce frequency on a finding of sustained compliance; authority to impose the intermediate sanctions in Component Four, subject to exceptions; and no authority to order execution of the adult sentence, which must be reserved to a circuit court judge on a de novo record.

The model here is Maryland’s own problem-solving courts. Drug courts work—to the extent they work—because the same judicial officer sees the same participant frequently and responds swiftly, certainly, and proportionately. That is not a soft-on-crime proposition. It is the most consistently supported finding in the community supervision literature, and it is the reason the magistrate tier is load-bearing rather than decorative.

Component Seven: Specialized Clinical Supervision

This component determines whether the entire structure functions or becomes merely a longer leash held by an officer with two hundred other files.

Maryland should establish a dedicated transition-age supervision caseload for extended-jurisdiction cases, staffed by officers with clinical training in adolescent and young-adult development, trauma, substance use, and family systems, operating at substantially reduced caseload ratios, and oriented toward problem-solving rather than surveillance. These officers should have standing authority to convene family meetings, coordinate directly with treatment providers and the Youth Works Corps supervisors described in Section VIII, and recommend sanctions on the Component Four ladder without a formal violation filing.

This is the component with the strongest evidence base in the whole proposal, and it is worth setting the evidence out.

The Hidalgo County Emerging Adult Supervision program in Texas was evaluated through an experiment examining a specialized caseload for emerging adults on probation. It decreased arrests, motions to revoke, and failures to appear for probation office visits, and improved outcomes on every stability measure examined except education. That is experimental evidence of reduced revocation—which is precisely the outcome the critics of this proposal will be most worried about—from a Texas jurisdiction.

Other jurisdictions have built comparable units. Los Angeles County’s CORE Supervision program supervises eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds at an average caseload ratio of twenty to one and is explicitly designed around an intensive relationship among the client, the officer, and the program provider, on the express rationale that this population is legally adult but developmentally not. The Massachusetts Probation Service launched a division focused on emerging adults aged eighteen to twenty-four—who constitute 15.3 percent of its adult caseload—partnering with seven District Courts to pilot developmentally informed services. Dallas County operates a federally funded Emerging Adult Caseload Collaboration aimed specifically at the high revocation rate among seventeen-to-twenty-five-year-olds under community supervision.

The clinical training element is likewise established practice rather than novelty. Specialized mental health probation caseloads have been implemented by well over a hundred agencies nationally, with a developed research literature on their effects and on the resources officers need to deliver them.

A single sentence in the enabling statute should make the ratio and training requirements binding rather than aspirational, because a specialized caseload that is specialized only on the organization chart is worse than none at all—it consumes the appropriation and produces none of the effect.

Component Eight: The Maryland Youth Works Corps

The eighth component addresses a problem the other seven do not touch. A young man released from a juvenile facility at nineteen, or supervised in the community from seventeen, generally does not know how to hold a job. Not because he is unwilling—often he is desperate to—but because nobody has taught him. He has not learned to show up at a fixed time, to take direction from a supervisor he dislikes, to work through a day he does not feel like working through, to be paid and to manage what he is paid. These are learned behaviors, and they are learned from families and early employment. A significant proportion of the young people in this system have had neither.

Telling that young man to go find a job is not a plan. It is the absence of one, and it fails in a predictable way: he does not find work, or finds it and loses it within a month, and the failure is then recorded as a violation of a condition of probation.

Maryland should therefore establish a state-operated employment program—the Maryland Youth Works Corps—available by court order as a condition of the juvenile disposition in extended jurisdiction cases, and open on a voluntary basis more broadly. Section VIII sets out the design, the evidence, and the legal questions it raises.

VIII. The Work Component in Detail

A. Design

The Corps should place participants on supervised crews performing genuine public work: highway and transportation maintenance under the Maryland Department of Transportation, State Highway Administration projects, municipal cleaning and grounds work, park and shoreline maintenance under the Department of Natural Resources, weatherization and rehabilitation of public housing stock, and—for participants who progress—entry-level construction trades work with a pathway into registered apprenticeship.

Four design features are essential.

It must be real work with real output. Make-work is transparent to the participants within a week and destroys the program’s credibility with them and with the public. The Corps should be assigned tasks that a state agency genuinely needs done and would otherwise contract out.

It must be paid. The federal Youth Conservation Corps model is the template: participants are paid at the state or federal minimum wage, whichever is higher, for a standard forty-hour week. Payment is not a concession; it is what makes the experience an actual job rather than a punishment dressed as one, and it is the answer to most of the legal objections discussed below.

Placement must be state-operated, not merely a referral to private employers. This is the point on which similar programs most often fail. A condition that says “obtain and maintain employment” places the entire burden of finding work on the person least equipped to do it, in a labor market that screens out applicants with records. A condition that says “report to the Corps at 6:30 a.m. Monday” is enforceable and achievable. Private-sector placement should be the graduation step, not the entry point.

Compliance must be a condition of the disposition. Failure to report or to perform is a violation—handled, like every other violation, on the Component Four ladder rather than by execution of the adult sentence. The work requirement is only meaningful if it is enforced, and it is only fair if the enforcement is graduated.

The Corps should be open to participants from age sixteen through the end of the extended jurisdiction period, with participation conditioned on a court finding that the young person is able to work and that placement is appropriate. It should not be universal. Some participants will be in residential treatment, in school full time, or clinically unsuited, and the court should say so on the record.

B. What the Evidence Actually Shows

Honesty requires the same treatment here as in Section VI, and this component has the weakest evidentiary support of the eight.

The closest analogue is the New York City Justice Corps, which provided community service, internship, and employment and educational services to justice-involved young adults. Evaluation found strong impacts on employment outcomes and wages—and no impact on recidivism. Job Corps, evaluated with a twenty-year follow-up horizon, shows a broadly similar pattern.

The most rigorous long-run evidence comes from research on the Civilian Conservation Corps, the largest employment program in American history. Economists using lifetime observational data combined with modern randomized-trial results found that longer service in the CCC produced improvements in height, health status, longevity, geographic mobility, and lifetime earnings—but did not improve short-term labor market outcomes including employment and wages.

Taken together, sixty years of evidence supports a consistent conclusion: publicly operated youth employment programs improve earnings trajectories and life outcomes over the long run, and they do not, standing alone, reliably reduce reoffending.

C. Why That Is the Right Answer Anyway

The Corps is not offered here as a crime-reduction intervention, and the case for it does not depend on the recidivism literature.

It does three things the other components cannot. It gives the magistrate something concrete and continuously observable to measure—attendance, punctuality, performance—rather than the abstractions that ordinarily populate a probation report. It occupies the hours during which young men in this population get into trouble. And it teaches, by doing, the specific behaviors that make a person employable at twenty-five.

The recidivism work in this proposal is done by the stayed sentence, the frequent judicial contact, and the specialized supervision. The Corps does the socialization and supplies the compliance metric. Those are different functions, and the literature is clear that the job program cannot perform the first one on its own. It should not be asked to.

D. The Legal Questions

A state-operated, court-ordered work program raises three questions that should be answered in the enabling legislation rather than in litigation.

Involuntary servitude. The Thirteenth Amendment prohibits involuntary servitude except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, and Article 24 of the Maryland Declaration of Rights supplies independent constraints. Two features of the design resolve the concern. Participants are paid at prevailing minimum wage for standard hours, which distinguishes the Corps from uncompensated penal labor. And participation is a condition of a disposition the young person may decline in favor of the alternative disposition the court would otherwise impose—the statute should make that election explicit and require it to be taken on the record with counsel present.

Wage and hour law. If participants are employees, the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Maryland Wage and Hour Law apply. The cleanest course is to accept that they are employees, pay them accordingly, and be done with it. Attempting to characterize the Corps as a training program outside the wage laws would invite exactly the litigation the program can least afford.

Workers’ compensation and liability. Participants performing highway and construction work will be injured. The enabling statute should place them within the workers’ compensation system on the same footing as other state employees and should address the State’s tort exposure for their acts, following the model of existing Maryland conservation and public-service corps programs.

Two further design cautions are worth stating. Historical evaluation of state conservation corps programs has documented complaints of low pay and poor conditions, and has also found that the quality of supervisory relationships—whether senior staff actively mentored corps members—was the principal determinant of whether the experience produced anything positive. Crew supervisors are therefore not a clerical hire. They should be selected and trained as the program’s central personnel, because the evidence says the supervisor is the intervention.

IX. Objections

A. “This is net-widening—a slower road to adult prison.”

This is the most serious objection and it deserves a direct answer. Extended accountability does mean extended exposure. A young man supervised until twenty-five has eight years in which to accumulate technical violations, where under current law he would have four.

The answer is structural, and it is the reason Components Three, Four, and Five exist. Execution of the adult sentence is available only on specified triggers. Everything else runs on a capped, graduated ladder modeled on a mechanism Maryland already uses for adult probationers. And the State cannot move for execution without first certifying in writing which intermediate sanctions were imposed and why they failed.

There is also a comparison to be made. The relevant counterfactual is not a world in which these young people are unsupervised. It is the current world, in which they are transferred to adult court at seventeen and sentenced as adults. Extended jurisdiction is the alternative to that, not an addition to it. The eligibility criteria in Component Two should be drawn to make that explicit by limiting designation to cases in which transfer is otherwise available.

B. “This is transfer by another name.”

It is the opposite. Transfer produces an adult conviction with all its collateral consequences—employment, housing, licensure, immigration, firearms disability—attaching immediately and permanently. A juvenile-inclusive blend produces a delinquency adjudication, and the adult sentence attaches only if the young person defaults on specified conditions. A young man who completes an extended jurisdiction disposition successfully emerges at twenty-five with a juvenile record, not a felony conviction.

The statute should say so expressly: successful completion discharges the stayed sentence and the adjudication retains its juvenile character for all purposes, including expungement eligibility.

C. “It will be applied unequally.”

Minnesota’s own courts found that race influenced selection for EJJ, and the objection must be conceded rather than argued around. The response is the design: statutory eligibility criteria rather than open discretion; a clear-and-convincing burden on the State; findings on the record; designation available on the child’s motion as well as the State’s; and mandatory annual reporting of designation data by jurisdiction, offense, age, and race.

Maryland is unusually well positioned here, because Chapter 609 of 2026 already establishes an annual reporting stream from the Department of Juvenile Services and the Governor’s Office of Crime Prevention and Policy to the Commission on Juvenile Justice Reform and Emerging and Best Practices beginning October 1, 2027. Extended jurisdiction data should be added to that existing stream rather than creating a new one.

D. “It costs too much.”

It costs something, and the specialized caseload and the Corps are the expensive parts. Three points bear on the fiscal analysis.

The volume is small. Blended designations are rare in every state that has them — the Ohio research found a ratio on the order of 205 conventional adjudications to each serious youthful offender designation. This is not a mass program.

There are offsets. Maryland is currently holding youth charged as adults in Department of Juvenile Services custody pre-disposition for an average of 147 days, against 27 days for youth whose cases originate in juvenile court. Reducing transfer volume reduces that. And every extended jurisdiction case that succeeds is a case that does not become a Division of Correction commitment, at a per-inmate annual cost the Department of Legislative Services can readily supply.

And the Corps generates output. Highway maintenance, park work, and public housing rehabilitation performed by Corps crews is work the State would otherwise procure. The fiscal note should be built on net cost, not gross appropriation.

E. “Why not just fix the transfer statute?”

Because the transfer statute is not what is broken. Courts and Judicial Proceedings § 3-8A-06 asks a sensible question—whether the child is an unfit subject for juvenile rehabilitative measures—and requires the court to address five factors on the record. The problem is that judges are answering that question under a constraint the statute does not mention: that a “fit” answer buys only three or four years. No amount of tinkering with the transfer criteria relieves that constraint. Only extending the clock does.

F. “The evidence does not support it.”

On recidivism, largely conceded, and Section VI says so. The evidence supports three narrower propositions: that specialized emerging-adult supervision reduces arrests, revocation motions, and failures to appear; that publicly operated youth employment improves long-run earnings and health; and that at least one credible study found EJJ youth reoffended less than either conventional juveniles or certified adults. Beyond that, the argument is one of institutional design rather than program evaluation—that a court should have a graduated option between a three-year leash and an adult prison sentence, and that Maryland presently offers none.

X. What We Are Asking the General Assembly to Do

A bill implementing this proposal would do the following.

Create a new subtitle within Title 3, Subtitle 8A of the Courts and Judicial Proceedings Article establishing extended juvenile jurisdiction as a designated proceeding, with eligibility limited by age and enumerated offense, designation on motion of either party, a clear-and-convincing burden on the State, and findings on the record.

Require the court, on adjudication or admission in a designated case, to impose both a juvenile disposition and an adult sentence, and to stay execution of the adult sentence on stated conditions.

Displace the termination of jurisdiction at twenty-one for designated cases, substituting twenty-five, extendable to twenty-eight on written findings reviewed at least annually.

Specify by statute the conduct that permits execution of the stayed sentence, and provide that all other violations are addressed on a graduated menu of intermediate sanctions with credit for time served.

Require a written exhaustion certification from the supervising officer, served on counsel, before the State may move for execution.

Provide for standing magistrate referral of designated cases under Title 11 of the Maryland Rules, with continuity of assignment, a mandatory review calendar, authority over intermediate sanctions, exceptions preserved, and execution of the adult sentence reserved to a circuit court judge.

Direct the Department of Juvenile Services to establish a specialized transition-age supervision caseload with statutory training and caseload-ratio requirements.

Establish the Maryland Youth Works Corps, with participants compensated at not less than the greater of the state or federal minimum wage, covered by workers’ compensation, and placed in state-operated public works crews, with participation electable on the record with counsel.

Add extended jurisdiction designation, revocation, and sanction data—disaggregated by jurisdiction, offense, age, and race—to the annual reporting required by Chapter 609 of 2026.

Provide that successful completion discharges the stayed sentence and preserves the juvenile character of the adjudication for all purposes.

A companion resolution directing the Commission on Juvenile Justice Reform and Emerging and Best Practices to study extended jurisdiction models and report before the 2028 session would be an acceptable first step, and may be the realistic one. It is not, however, a substitute. The Commission already exists; the studies already exist; what is missing is the statute.

XI. Conclusion

The argument of this memorandum is not that Maryland has been too lenient with juveniles, and it is not that Maryland has been too harsh. It is that Maryland has been operating with a tool missing from the box.

A judge looking at a seventeen-year-old charged with a serious violent offense has two options and needs three. He can keep the case in a system that will help the child and let go of him in three years, or he can send the case to a system that will hold the child for a decade and help him with nothing. What he cannot do—what judges in Minnesota, Texas, Kansas, Montana, Michigan, and a dozen other states have been able to do for thirty years—is impose a real consequence, suspend it, and then spend the next eight years finding out whether the young man in front of him is going to need it.

That is not softness. Nothing in this proposal reduces anyone’s exposure; a young man designated for extended jurisdiction is accountable for longer than he would be under any existing Maryland disposition, and the sentence hanging over him is a real one. Nor is it a promise. The evidence does not support a claim that blended jurisdiction will reduce crime, and this memorandum has been at pains not to make one.

What it is, is common sense about time. Adolescence does not end at twenty-one, and neither should the court’s ability to stay involved with a young man who is still becoming whoever he is going to be. Give the judge the third option. Write the eligibility narrowly, specify the triggers precisely, build the ladder, assign the magistrate, train the officers, and put the young man to work. Then measure it, publish the numbers, and be willing to change it.

The 2026 session moved these cases into the juvenile court. The next session should give the juvenile court enough time to do something with them.

Appendix A: Comparative Reference

Jurisdiction	Authority	Model	Feature relevant to Maryland
Minnesota	Minn. Stat. § 260B.130; Minn. R. Juv. Delinq. P. 19.11	Juvenile-inclusive	Dual disposition; adult sentence stayed; age 14 threshold; clear-and-convincing designation standard; jurisdiction to 21
Texas	Tex. Fam. Code (determinate sentencing provisions)	Juvenile-contiguous	Determinate sentence up to 40 years; TJJD custody with transfer to TDCJ; determinate-sentence probation as community alternative
Kansas	K.S.A. § 38-2364	Juvenile-inclusive	Revocation procedure specified on the face of the statute: hearing, right to counsel, preponderance standard
Montana	Mont. Code Ann. § 41-5-1605	Juvenile-inclusive	Three-option revocation menu; written statement of evidence and reasons; mandatory credit for time served; specified consequences of execution
Nebraska	Neb. Rev. Stat. § 43-286.01	Graduated response	Written report must state why graduated response sanctions were not used or were ineffective before formal revocation
Michigan	Juvenile-inclusive blend statutes	Juvenile-inclusive	Long-running inclusive blend; comparative reference
Ohio	Serious Youthful Offender provisions	Blend	NCSC research; designation is a rare event relative to conventional adjudications
Vermont	Blended provisions since 1998	Juvenile-inclusive (variant)	Adult criminal court judges play the central decision-making role — a design Maryland should not copy
Maryland (current)	Md. Code Ann., Cts. & Jud. Proc. §§ 3-8A-03, 3-8A-06, 3-8A-07; Crim. Proc. § 4-202	None	No blended option; jurisdiction terminates at 21; transfer is the only mechanism for extended accountability
Maryland (existing analogue)	Md. Code Ann., Crim. Proc. § 6-223	Graduated response	Capped confinement for first, second, and third technical violations — the model for Component Four

Appendix B: Principal Sources

Maryland General Assembly, Senate Bill 323 (2026 Reg. Sess.), Chapter 609 — bill text, committee amendments, and Department of Legislative Services Fiscal and Policy Note

Maryland General Assembly, House Bill 814 (2024 Reg. Sess.), Chapter 735, Juvenile Law Reform Act

Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Statistical Briefing Book — juvenile court blended sentencing offense and minimum age criteria; extended age of juvenile court jurisdiction

National Center for Juvenile Justice, Different from Adults: An Updated Analysis of Juvenile Transfer and Blended Sentencing Laws, With Recommendations for Reform

Minnesota Judicial Branch, 2002 study of Extended Jurisdiction Juvenile outcomes

Minnesota Judicial Branch, Blended Sentencing in Minnesota: On Target for Justice and Public Safety?

Extended Jurisdiction Juvenile Prosecutions: To Revoke or Not to Revoke, Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

National Center for State Courts, A Decade of NCSC Research on Blended Sentencing of Juvenile Offenders

University of North Texas, recidivism analysis of determinately sentenced youth in Texas

Texas District and County Attorneys Association, Determinate Sentencing for Juveniles

Swift Certain Fair Resource Center, Improving Probation Outcomes for Emerging Adults: An Experiment Evaluating a Specialized Caseload in Hidalgo County, Texas

Los Angeles County Probation Department, CORE Supervision program materials

Massachusetts Probation Service, FY 2025 Annual Report

Bureau of Justice Assistance, Emerging Adult Caseload Collaboration (Dallas County, Texas)

Skeem et al. and subsequent literature on specialty mental health probation caseloads

Urban Institute, Bridges to Education and Employment for Justice-Involved Youth (New York City Justice Corps evaluation)

Aizer et al., Do Youth Employment Programs Work? Evidence from the New Deal (National Bureau of Economic Research)

National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service, Youth Conservation Corps program terms

This memorandum is offered as policy advocacy and general legal commentary. It is not legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Statutory citations reflect research current as of August 2026 and should be independently verified against the current codes and the Maryland Rules before use in any filing or bill draft.

The Cliff at Twenty-One: The Case for Blended Juvenile Jurisdiction in Maryland

Contents

I. Introduction: The Cliff at Twenty-One