BREAKING🚨 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. Veronica Spears started shaking when she read a letter saying her grandfather had a brother who died there at 12, as Jenny Abamu first reported in WAMU 88.5. "We never knew," she said. The family was told Arthur Hamilton died of tuberculosis in 1917. Researchers believe he's somewhere among the cinder blocks. Her cousin Chuck Copeland, a pastor, knelt to read one headstone: Mark Davis, 13, from Baltimore, 1885. "He meant nothing to them," Copeland said. In Missouri, at least 51 children are buried at the old State Training School for Boys. The site is now an adult state prison. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore signed a law creating a $1 million commission to investigate the deaths and restore the cemetery, with the boys' families on it. State Sen. Will Smith also passed a bill this year that stops some charges, like firearm possession, from automatically sending kids to adult court. Smith credits the legislature's Black caucus trip to the Cheltenham graves for getting it passed. The change took effect this month.