Inmate killings surged 75 percent last year — the worst in ten years. The Moore administration’s response was to close a facility and consolidate prisoners into the same maximum-security prisons where most of the violence occurred.
By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Maryland state prisons recorded 14 inmate homicides in 2025 — the highest total in at least a decade — and three more have already been logged in the first months of 2026, according to data published this week by the Capital News Service from records obtained from the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services.
The numbers are stark on their own. They are harder to explain in context: the Moore administration’s primary institutional response to the violence crisis was to close a Jessup facility last fall and transfer its 700-plus inmates to other prisons — including North Branch Correctional Institution in Allegany County, which alone recorded five homicides in 2025, and Jessup Correctional Institution, which recorded four.
The two facilities that received the largest share of MCI-J’s transferred population account for nearly half of all inmate homicides from last year.
A Surge No Single Year Explains
The 14 homicides recorded in 2025 represented a 75 percent increase over 2024’s total of eight — which was itself a 166 percent increase over historical norms. Before this two-year run, five homicides in a single year was considered high. The previous decade’s total through 2023 averaged fewer than three per year.
Twenty-two of the 46 inmate homicides recorded since 2015 happened in just the last two years. Nearly half a decade of violence, compressed into 24 months.
About 70 percent of inmate homicides since 2015 occurred at three facilities: North Branch, Jessup Correctional Institution, and Western Correctional Institution in Allegany County. These are the system’s maximum-security prisons — and they are the facilities absorbing the population displaced by MCI-J’s closure.
Staffing: The Number the Administration Is Still Running From
The DPSCS data offers a clear structural explanation for the violence, even if the department hasn’t offered one itself. The number of allocated correctional officer positions across Maryland’s 13 state prisons decreased 18 percent between July 2019 and July 2025. System-wide, including pretrial and other facilities, the decrease in allocated positions was 27 percent over the same period.
At North Branch — the facility with five homicides last year and two more already in 2026 — the number of allocated correctional officer positions dropped by more than 100 between 2019 and 2025. Vacancy rates at the facility climbed from around 11 percent to 16 percent over that period.
The AFSCME union’s own analysis, conducted with DPSCS data from 2022 and 2023, found that all facilities were operating with a ratio of more than 100 inmates per officer — a ratio the report described as undermining staff’s ability to respond to incidents. Assaults against both inmates and staff have more than doubled since 2021, according to the department’s own FY2027 budget overview.
Secretary Scruggs, in testimony before legislators last year, attributed the violence surge primarily to a more violent prison population and an increased flow of contraband — particularly through legal mail. Civil rights attorney Cary Hansel, who handles prison abuse cases, offered a different assessment: he called the spike a product of “complete lack of care toward incarcerated persons by those in the highest levels of DPSCS, from the wardens upward,” and pointed to documented cases in which wardens acknowledged known sources of weapon-making material in cells but took no corrective action.
The MCI-J Closure: A Cost Cut Sold as a Safety Fix
In September 2025, Governor Moore announced plans to close the Maryland Correctional Institution at Jessup by June 30, 2026. The stated rationale was fiscal: the facility’s foundation was described as “sinking into the earth due to substantial water penetration,” and full repairs would cost roughly $200 million. The closure would save approximately $21 million per year in operating costs, including an estimated $19.2 million in overtime savings.
The administration also framed the closure as a safety improvement. “Adequate staff is proactive security,” Secretary Scruggs said in the announcement. By consolidating staff from MCI-J into surrounding facilities, the argument went, the department could reduce the chronic overtime burden and improve supervision ratios.
AFSCME, the union representing correctional workers, pushed back immediately. “We are alarmed that the State is moving towards closing MCI-J without a larger and more comprehensive plan regarding the State’s correctional facilities, the needs of incarcerated individuals, and departmental staffing as a whole,” AFSCME Maryland President Patrick Moran said at the time.
The union’s concern was specific: the proposed $1 billion Baltimore Therapeutic Treatment Center, which has been floated as a longer-term system replacement, lacks any staffing plan. Meanwhile, the immediate effect of MCI-J’s closure is to concentrate over 700 inmates — including transfers routed to North Branch, Roxbury, and the Maryland Correctional Institution at Hagerstown — into facilities that were already producing the worst violence numbers the system had seen in a generation.
The closure’s June 30 deadline is now weeks away. There has been no updated public accounting of where the transferred population has been placed, what the current staffing ratios look like at receiving facilities, or whether the homicide rate at those facilities has changed since the transfers began.
Some Deaths Weren’t Disclosed At All
The violence data is troubling enough on its own. The disclosure picture around it is worse.
Maryland has no statutory requirement that corrections officials publicize inmate deaths. In practice, details about prison homicides have typically been released by Maryland State Police, which investigates the killings. But in 2025, state police did not issue press releases for at least two of the homicides — meaning those deaths were not publicly known until journalists specifically sought the underlying data.
One of those victims was Yera Basnueva, who died at Jessup Correctional Institution in July. The medical examiner attributed his death to injuries from an assault that had occurred the year before. Another homicide at North Branch — Jamal Colbert, found dead in his cell on November 21 — also generated no public notification from state police. In both cases, the public record was effectively blank until reporting outlets pulled mortality records directly from DPSCS.
The 2025 General Assembly passed legislation requiring state officials to notify elected leaders when an inmate dies in custody — a transparency floor that, notably, did not exist before. Advocates called it insufficient. They were right: notifying legislators is not the same as notifying the public, and a law that triggers only after journalists have already found the bodies doesn’t solve the underlying disclosure problem.
AFSCME’s position adds another dimension the administration hasn’t addressed. Stuart Katzenberg, the union’s director of collective bargaining and growth, warned that the combination of growing violence and chronic understaffing at the state’s most restrictive prisons has meant some dangerous people are being moved to less-controlled environments — a direct consequence, the union argues, of consolidating population without first fixing staffing ratios.
What the Moore Administration Owes the Public
Governor Moore has made public safety a signature issue of his first term, repeatedly citing reductions in Baltimore homicides as evidence of effective governance. The argument is not without merit on its own terms. But the same administration has presided over a doubling of prison assaults since 2021, the worst two-year run of inmate homicides Maryland has recorded in recent history, a documented pattern of deaths that weren’t publicly disclosed, and a prison consolidation plan that the correctional officers’ own union says is pushing dangerous inmates into facilities not equipped to handle them.
There is still no correctional ombudsman with independent inspection authority. The department’s public communications this year have focused on reentry programming, entrepreneurship workshops, and art expos inside facilities where people are being killed.
The data published this week is state data, drawn from DPSCS’s own records. The administration knows what it shows. The question is whether anyone in Annapolis — or on the campaign trail — will be required to answer for it.
Sources: Capital News Service/Maryland Daily Record, April 22, 2026; Baltimore Banner, December 30, 2025, and January 27, 2026; DPSCS correctional officer staffing data; AFSCME Maryland/DPSCS 2022–23 staffing analysis; Governor Moore’s office MCI-J closure announcement, September 29, 2025; Maryland State Police homicide unit press releases.
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