By NICOLE RAMOS and TIASIA SAUNDERS
Capital News Service
In 2025, Maryland lawmakers learned of a mass, unmarked grave site near the House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children, now known as the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center, southeast of Washington, D.C. where an estimated 243 Black youths died during their incarceration.
A Capital News Service investigation into early juvenile detention facilities nationwide found 1,349 youths died while incarcerated in 96 facilities in the United States from 1825 through 2011. Of the facilities investigated, more than half faced allegations of abuse and over one-fifth had allegations of forced labor. Cheltenham and the New York House of Refuge, researched by author and genealogist Clark Kidder, topped the list with 243 deaths each.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, juvenile detention facilities — intended to move youths out of prison and into more humane environments in the name of reform — subjected numerous boys and girls to harsh, prison-like conditions that reinforced cycles of abuse and, at times, resulted in deaths.
One of the most dramatic cases at a juvenile facility nationwide occurred in Arkansas in 1959 when 21 boys, trapped inside a dormitory at the Negro Boys Industrial School in Wrightsville, burned to death on the night of March 5, 1959. The doors were locked from the outside and 48 escaped by knocking out window screens.
Fourteen of the boys were buried in one mass grave at a nearby cemetery, which one family member later said was not a proper burial. The Black History Commission of Arkansas held a ceremony in 2018 to commemorate the placement of 14 headstones for each boy at the mass grave site, an Arkansas news outlet reported.
CNS combed through online sources, including news articles, historical society archives and cemetery records to uncover documented evidence of abuse, forced labor and deaths of incarcerated youths throughout the nation’s earliest juvenile detention centers. CNS created a data table to organize and analyze the documented cases, tracking details such as facility, gender, race, death count and whether the facility was still in existence. The research was supplemented by similar work from Georgetown University’s Center for Youth Justice, which found a dozen facilities not in the original CNS count.
The CNS research found 28 cemeteries exist at juvenile detention facilities, once designated as reformatories and industrial schools, in widely varying conditions. Some sit in fields on active correctional facilities, others are hidden deep in the woods and a handful have been newly marked with plaques by communities acknowledging those who died there.
These burial sites do not represent a complete record of those deaths. In many cases, it remains unclear how many of the deceased are actually buried in them, whether more cemeteries exist and whether their reported causes of death tell the whole story.
Some cemeteries for the young inmates received little public attention. In two cases — cemeteries on the grounds of the Eldora State Training School in Eldora, Iowa, and the former Virginia Industrial Home School for Colored Girls in Mechanicsville, Virginia — CNS located cemeteries that have drawn little public notice.
At Eldora, 38 youths once incarcerated at the facility are buried in a well-kept cemetery on the grounds, still operating as a state training school for juvenile offenders. The years of their deaths range from 1875 to 1931, according to Danielle Sample, spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services. Each burial site is marked with a small marker, and records exist for those interred, Sample said. It is open by appointment only.
The former Virginia Industrial Home School for Colored Girls is on land purchased by Hanover County earlier this year. A land appraisal report notes a “small cemetery” on the property, but a county official said they have no further information about it.
The state of Maryland has launched a formal investigation into the neglected cemetery at Cheltenham and recently installed a historic placard near the site acknowledging abuse and forced labor.
Maryland lawmakers are not alone in their push to investigate the lost lives of incarcerated youths. The discovery at the House of Reformation marked the second discovery of mass burials of Black incarcerated boys in the United States in recent years. The first discovery was in Florida in 2014, when human remains of 55 people were exhumed from the grounds of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. Almost 100 youths are estimated to have died while incarcerated at the facility, according to a research team led by Professor Erin Kimmerle of the University of South Florida’s Department of Anthropology.
In New York, 14 people, primarily girls and infants, are buried at the Hudson Correctional Facility, former site of the New York State Training School for Girls, in Hudson, New York, about 120 miles north of New York City.
Alison Cornyn, artist and director of the Incorrigibles project, aims to tell the stories of incarcerated girls throughout the United States through multimedia projects. Cornyn found that some girls, who were often sent to the New York State Training School for Girls after experiencing physical and sexual abuse at home, faced solitary confinement and continued abuse at the facility.
Black youths were segregated for decades, their conditions worse than for the others, and were forced to do laundry for the whole facility, Cornyn found in her research. The New York Office of Children and Family Services declined to comment.
“We need to understand how this happened, and why it happened, and so we can prevent it from happening again,” Cornyn said.
During the late 19th and early 20th century, some juvenile incarceration facilities operated on a progressive ideal, creating separate institutions so children would not be locked up in adult prisons. Black communities fought equal access to these youth-only facilities, said Geoff Ward, author of “The Black Child-Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice.”
The idealism of reformation wasn’t fulfilled in many cases, especially in facilities for Black youth. The white operators of these facilities, especially in the South, regarded the young Black inmates as fundamentally incorrigible, Ward said.
Some Black boys at Cheltenham were subject to indentured servitude — a practice that did not exist within Maryland’s juvenile detention facility for white youth, known as the House of Refuge in Baltimore County.
Forced, heavy labor with little to no regard for education or vocational training existed among other facilities for Black youth, including the Negro Boys Industrial School, which functioned as a juvenile work farm at the time of the deadly fire.
Round-the-clock surveillance, a rigid schedule, contract labor and corporal punishment were central to operations at many juvenile facilities and industrial schools across the United States, deemed a necessary system to deal with “incorrigibility” of youth. The facilities functioned as clearing centers, detaining vulnerable or delinquent children and sending them to live in highly controlled systems that justified and perpetuated forced labor and abuse.
American youths, measured in 2023, are incarcerated at twice the global average rate, according to a 2025 report by the Prison Policy Initiative.
The report also found disproportionate representation of Black youths — 47% of boys and 39% of girls — in juvenile prisons, of which Black youths make up 18%.
Nearly 200 years ago, reformers sought to create a system to better protect youthful offenders. Yet, as many as one in 12 youths still end up in adult facilities and reports of abuse persist to this day in juvenile detention facilities, Prison Policy Initiative reported.
“What the earliest reformers recognized remains true today — how we treat children, the extent to which we recognize their humanity, recognize their capacity for full self-realization and support that, has implications for all of us and our collective future,” Ward said.
