A Maryland office received $622,883 from the Department of Justice to help youth escape drug and mental health problems but hardly served any clients, a federal watchdog agency found.
The state’s Office of the Public Defender never found an approved mental health agency to treat the children despite spending all the money between 2020 and 2025, the DOJ’s inspector general office said in a Thursday report. The Maryland agency has repeatedly argued for such treatments as alternatives to incarceration, referring to young criminals as “justice-involved youth” in comments to local officials.
“We concluded that the grant requirements and the expected goal of the award were not met, and we identified $622,883 in questioned costs, which represents the entire grant amount,” the inspector general report said. The report asked the public defender’s office to “remedy” the wasted taxpayer dollars and change its internal policies to improve oversight.
The DOJ initially expected Maryland to use the money to serve 150 clients annually in their agreement, but it reduced the yearly goal to 30 in 2023. The public defender’s office ultimately could not give evidence that more than 10 clients were ever served, auditors found. The office blamed the issues on “fewer court referrals than anticipated,” the COVID-19 pandemic, “barriers” in rural areas, and “lower arrest rates among juveniles,” according to the report.
Maryland Public Defender Natasha Dartigue pushed back on the DOJ’s findings in comments to the Washington Examiner.
Dartigue’s office “reviewed the report and acknowledges that our documentation processes needed modernization, which we have now implemented, but these administrative gaps never prevented us from delivering essential, life-altering mental health and legal stability to 48 rural youth during the height of the pandemic,” she said. “Throughout the grant period the DOJ’s own agency, [the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention], monitored our progress, conducted five desk reviews, and consistently validated our work as ‘satisfactory’ and ‘compliant.’
“We have taken the administrative feedback seriously, but it is critical to distinguish between the ‘administrative deficiencies’ found by the OIG and the programmatic success we delivered to vulnerable youth,” Dartigue told the Washington Examiner. “We look forward to continued collaboration in support of our youth.”
The state’s lawmakers have grappled with how to end Maryland’s reputation for having higher youth incarceration rates than the national average. Juvenile arrests in Maryland were 20% higher in 2024 than in 2020 and increased each year from 2021 to 2024, according to the state’s Department of Juvenile Services.
For the OPD and other state officials, one solution is putting fewer people in jail.
Gov. Wes Moore (D-MD) signed the Democrat-backed Youth Charging Reform Act in May, removing seven categories of crimes for which youth would be tried in adult courts instead of more lenient juvenile courts. Starting in October, juvenile courts will have jurisdiction over certain assault, abduction, kidnapping, robbery, gun, and sexual offense cases, plus some life-sentence crimes for defendants between 14 and 16 years old.
LOCAL GOVERNMENTS KEEP MISUSING FEDERAL MONEY MEANT FOR CRIME VICTIMS: DOJ INSPECTORS
The OPD praised the law in May for curtailing “Maryland’s carceral system” — but said it did not go far enough.
“But 26 automatic pathways to adult court remain,” the office said. “Twenty-six offenses where a child can still be sent into the adult system before the law requires anyone to ask a single question about who that child is. The evidence is clear: automatic adult prosecution does not make communities safer.”