Via Josh Helfgott on Facebook…

Researchers just found the graves of more than 1,000 children who died LOCKED UP in America’s youth prisons, scattered across 29 states, most in plots nobody bothered to mark.

Georgetown University researchers have traced children’s graves to 40 reform schools and youth prisons, from Salem, Oregon, to Augusta, Maine. The kids died between the early 1800s and the 1950s. Most were poor and disproportionately Black. Many had committed no serious crime and were locked up for being “incorrigible.” Death records mostly blame tuberculosis or flu. The project’s leader, Marc Schindler, says those records deserve skepticism, and his team’s report lists “violence and neglect” among the causes.

The biggest site is in the woods across the street from Maryland’s Cheltenham Youth Detention Center, which opened in 1870 as the House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children. More than 230 Black boys are buried there. Children as young as 5 were sent there, some just for being poor, homeless or orphaned. A state report says white guards beat them with a brass-studded belt. In the 1920s the boys were leased out to nearby farms, and the institution kept most or all of their pay.

State officials knew that cemetery existed for decades and did nothing. Schindler rediscovered it in 2024, while he was a top Maryland juvenile justice official. More than 200 of the graves are gray cinder blocks with no names or dates.

Don’t be lulled into thinking the abuse documented in this article is something out of the past. It’s still happening, only moved into privately owned and under the radar camps for so-called troubled youth; usually just teenagers being teenagers with parents who were probably brutalized themselves. Every now and then that youth gulag archipelago peeks out into the open, as when a couple years ago a kid whose parents sent him via an “escort” service to one in the backwoods of North Carolina was put into what the other kids there called “the burrito”: wrapped tightly and locked into an alarmed sleeping bag on his first night there. He had a panic attack that night, allegedly checked on, then later found dead, naked from the waist down, underwear next to his body, and bruises on his arms. Radio silence after a couple news articles about him and another kid who died trying to escape. These outfits often have powerful protectors in their state legislatures.

Faulkner said the past is not dead it is not even past. How humanity treats its young is its judgement on itself and whether it deserves a future. It’s the two sides of the human coin. We raise decent, noble souls as often as we grow sickeningly cruel sociopaths and indifferent zeros. Yes Sam, there is good in this world; but is it enough?