Executive Summary
Maryland’s criminal legal system is a vast, complex, and oftentimes inconsistent entity to capture. It can be difficult to create a full picture of how an individual interacts with the criminal legal system given that, until recently, data was limited and hard to find. Our landscape report of criminal legal data offers a baseline 10-year comprehensive data analysis of the adult and youth legal system, disaggregated by race, sex, adult and youth, and geography where available.
Additionally, the report discusses criminal legal reforms made by the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Maryland government over time. These reforms provide context about how policy affects adults and youth at various stages of the criminal legal system and how they are reflected in the data. The data in the report were drawn from publicly available state and federal sources. We hope this report serves policymakers, advocates, justice-involved individuals, the broader public, and all relevant stakeholders in supporting effort to make our criminal legal system transparent and an effective form of justice.
Key Findings
Maryland has made major criminal legal reforms since 2015, including changes to sentencing, bail and pretrial release, parole and probation, record expungement, cannabis pardons, and youth justice. These reforms were intended to reduce incarceration, use the cost savings from this reduction to expand alternatives to punishment, and improve fairness across the system. The data show some meaningful progress. Compared with 2015, Maryland has fewer people incarcerated, fewer people in jail, fewer people on parole or probation, and lower overall crime levels.[1]
Figure 1 shows the annual crime rate declined 15% between 2015 and 2024, despite a rebound after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Figure 2 shows adult arrests declined across all racial groups, falling 48% generally from calendar years 2015 to 2023 before rising in 2024 and declining in 2025.
Figure 3 shows that the total local jail population declined by 15% from calendar years 2015 to 2024. Disaggregated, the sentenced jail population fell by 56%, while the pretrial population increased by 5.6% after bail reform was enacted.
Figure 4 shows the sentenced population declined by 21% between fiscal years 2016 and 2025. The number of Black incarcerated individuals in state prisons declined by 17% from 2016 to 2025, while the decline in white incarcerated individuals was 38%. The number of Latino Marylanders incarcerated increased by 45% between 2021 and 2025 while the number of American Indians declined over 50%. The number of Asians in prison remained steady and those categorized as unknown race declined by 80%.
Even with these reductions, progress has been uneven. Figure 5 shows that the use of pretrial detention remains a major concern. People awaiting trial now make up a larger share of local jail populations than they did before bail reform, 74% in FY2024, despite a 19% decline in total people held from FY2018 to FY2024 and a decline in the number of people held because they could not pay a bond.
Racial disparities remain one of the clearest and most persistent findings. Black Marylanders make up about 30% of the state population but are far more represented in prisons, jails, arrests, parole, probation, and the youth justice system.
The youth justice system has also changed significantly. Maryland reduced many forms of youth detention, supervision, and out-of-home placement, especially during and after the COVID-19 period. Still, Black youth, particularly Black boys, continue to make up the largest share of youth involved in detention, supervision, formal petitions, and adult-court transfers. Black children are also disproportionately represented among youth charged as adults.
While Maryland’s reforms have helped reduce the size of the criminal legal system, they have not eliminated deep racial inequities or fully addressed reliance on pretrial detention. Maryland has improved transparency and public access to criminal legal data, but we note that key gaps remain, especially around race-specific case filings, parole decision-making, and consistent statewide prosecutorial data, which limits the state’s ability to fully assess the effects of reform. These findings reveal that well-intended policy reform, while yielding some good outcomes, can have unintended consequences and reveal structural challenges to address racial disparities in the criminal legal system.
Overall, we believe Maryland has made meaningful progress in addressing the footprint of the criminal legal system, but not yet in resolving the deeper structural inequities embedded within it. Moving forward, the state should follow best practices from state task force findings and other states to collect and publish additional data, grounding stakeholders in rigorous data to shape future policy discussions. The next 10 years of these trends in the system will depend not only on policy evolutions, but on sustained investment in community-based alternatives, racial justice initiatives, and stronger public data systems to properly measure the outcomes.
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Acknowledgement
This work was made possible by the support of Public Welfare Foundation (PWF). The content of this report is the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the views or positions of PWF. For over seventy-five years, Public Welfare Foundation has supported efforts to advance justice and opportunity for people in need. Today, its efforts focus on catalyzing a transformative approach to justice that is community-led, restorative, and racially just through investments in criminal justice and youth justice reforms. These efforts honor the Foundation’s core values of racial equity, economic well-being, and fundamental fairness for all.
[1] Note that some of the steepest declines in incarceration, detention, and court activity occurred during the COVID-19 period, when executive decisions, altered court operations, and public health measures limited the footprint of the criminal legal system. Reported crime remained below 2015 levels despite a rebound after the COVID-19 pandemic.