It was in the wake of the 2015 Baltimore Uprising, sparked by the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray in police custody, that Brittany Young was convinced that the city needed meaningful alternatives to incarceration and stronger pathways to careers in STEM for both youth and adults.
A Park Heights native, retired engineer, and nonprofit founder, Young created B-360 in response to that need, creating an organization that utilizes the city’s dirt bike culture to work toward ending poverty, disrupting the prison pipeline, and building bridges in communities. Through its STEM-based curriculum, rider safety initiatives, community events, and advocacy for safe riding spaces, B-360 seeks to shift perceptions about dirt bike culture. This past summer, B-360 provided programming for hundreds of youth campers across Baltimore.
For decades, Baltimore has carried a reputation as a city riddled with crime and violence, in part due to sensationalized media coverage. But over the last five years, the city and the state have seen historic reductions in homicides and other categories of violent crime.
In 2015, when Young founded B-360, 344 people were killed in Baltimore. Twenty-two of those killed were youths. In 2025, those numbers were down dramatically to 133 murders and only three youth homicides, according to data released by Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration.
For the past three summers, Scott’s administration has prioritized providing youth-focused engagement and event opportunities.
“Baltimore’s young people are our greatest resource, and they deserve safe, welcoming environments to enjoy themselves and foster positive development,” Scott said in a written press release on October 13. “Every year, our Summer Youth Engagement strategy is about balancing those opportunities with proactive engagement to deter activities that jeopardize the safety of our young people and the broader community.”
The Mayor’s Office and the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks collaborated to design youth jobs, activities, a resource fair, and teen-focused events. According to data from the Mayor’s Office, 865 young people attended at least one pool party hosted by Rec & Parks, 2,864 attended a Rec & Parks summer camp, and 8,130 youth were employed through the YouthWorks program. Additionally, Baltimore City Public Schools offered summer learning programs to 12,651 students across the district in subjects such as fine arts, engineering, algebra, and more.
“Our mayor has done a good job of making sure that young people feel seen and feel heard,” Young said during a Zoom interview in late July. “Baltimore is on a record decline of homicides, murders, all the things, because our mayor invested in Baltimore youth.”
Listening to the perspective of young people, believing and uplifting them, and giving them a space to belong is what B-360 is all about. Across Baltimore and Maryland, other community-based organizations are taking a similar approach, offering young people mentorship, employment resources, and alternatives to punitive systems.
Young’s vision for B-360 was partly shaped by her younger brother, who was incarcerated as a minor for a nonviolent offense.
“My little brother at the time was incarcerated for a nonviolent offense. So when I looked at dirt bike riders, when I looked at what was happening, I saw my brother,” Young explained. “If my brother would have had programming, I feel like that would have also been able to change his life.”
She was also inspired by her fourth-grade student at the time, Daron Harrell, who was passionate about dirt bikes. He learned the chemistry and science behind bikes, how to ride and repair them, as well as the mechanics required to pop wheelies.
“I like that she actually took time with me and actually saw something in me when I was a little kid in school,” said Harrell, who is now 19 and works as a junior dirt bike instructor and part of the nonprofit’s workforce program. “I just told her I wanted to be a dirt bike rider, and I always said that with passion. I’m very appreciative. I just can’t thank her enough.”
“I like that she actually took time with me and actually saw something in me when I was a little kid in school,” said Harrell, who is now 19 and works as a junior dirt bike instructor and part of the nonprofit’s workforce program. “I just told her I wanted to be a dirt bike rider, and I always said that with passion. I’m very appreciative. I just can’t thank her enough.”
Now in its ninth year, B-360 has served 13,000 young people in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. The nonprofit offers programming throughout the school year, which falls into three categories: workforce diversion, STEM educational programming/events, and advocacy. Since 2021, the organization has also helped redirect adults from incarceration to its programming and services. Additionally, B-360 also works in partnership with the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services for diversion programming for youth at risk of being incarcerated.
“Everybody knows that we’re the dirt bike capital,” said Harrell. “We hold the title for dirt bikes. Everybody loves us.”
Young’s program is situated among the ecosystem of nonprofits and community-based organizations in the city that play an important role in the city’s violence prevention efforts, providing programming, jobs, and wraparound support services. Now, the state is catching up to that work through reforms to keep young people out of adult court.
In May, Gov. Wes Moore signed the Youth Charging Reform Act into law. The law, which goes into effect in October, removes five offenses for which 16- and 17-year-olds are automatically charged as adults.
With the passage of the law, bureaucracy is finally catching up to the work happening on the ground, according to Eric Ford, the executive director for public service programs at the Shriver Center at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The Choice Program at UMBC provides mentoring and advocacy, job readiness and development training, connections to resources, education, and holistic case management for youth in Maryland to help keep them out of the criminal legal system.
“Maryland has always been progressive in some of our interventions and our programming. What Maryland had was resistance, particularly with the law and charging youth as adults,” Ford said. “So it was this weird dynamic where we always had progressive programs on the ground doing some really phenomenal work around trauma-informed and restorative practices, but when it came time to change the actual law on the books, that is when we faced a lot of resistance, and it does seem and feel that the tides are changing.”
Though there’s been movement on legislation like the Youth Charging Reform Act, which Ford and other allies have advocated for years, there are still decades-old narratives about youth, crime, and punishment to undo. The 2024 Sentencing Project report found that coverage on
“youth justice issues” from six Baltimore-based media outlets “is skewed in ways that reinforce harmful stereotypes of children and adolescents. The Baltimore media’s intense focus on offending by youth was disproportionate to their actual role in Baltimore’s overall crime rate. Coverage often sensationalized isolated instances of youth violence.”
The Choice Program at UMBC began in the late 1980s at the height of mass incarceration and as superpredator mythology about young people came to be. That racist rhetoric fueled the notion that young people, particularly Black and brown youth, were lawless and reckless and stoked public fears in cities across the U.S. that they would wreak havoc and commit horrific acts of violence.
“So much blame is being placed at the feet of young people, and particularly young Black people in this country, in our cities, here in our state, and a lot of it is rooted in things that end up being just statements or assumptions,” said Nate Balis, director of the Juvenile Justice Strategy Group at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, an organization dedicated to “developing a brighter future” for young people.
“So much blame is being placed at the feet of young people, and particularly young Black people in this country, in our cities, here in our state, and a lot of it is rooted in things that end up being just statements or assumptions.”
Nate Balis, director of the Juvenile Justice Strategy Group at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, an organization dedicated to “developing a brighter future” for young people
In Maryland, children are charged as adults at higher rates than in every other state except Alabama. About 6% of Maryland’s prison population has been incarcerated since childhood, according to a 2021 Human Rights for Kids report.
“Our policies lead to a whole lot of young people being charged as adults, even if most of them don’t end up being convicted in criminal court,” Balis said. (A 2019 study by the Baltimore Action Legal Team, an activist legal organization, found that the majority of Baltimore defendants who were incarcerated pretrial were never convicted of a crime, either because their charges were dropped or they were acquitted.)
When minors are charged as adults in Maryland, some are automatically sent to adult jails and detention centers. They are even, in some cases, held in solitary confinement for safety reasons, according to Alice Wilkerson, executive director of Advance Maryland.
“Instead of starting in adult court where kids wait many months for their case to move forward, and eventually for these specific charges in this bill eventually to end up in juvenile court anyway, we are taking out that big, lengthy middle step, which is damaging to young people, and we are starting them in juvenile court instead,” she said.
Balis, Ford, and Wilkerson, along with other members of the state’s Youth Justice Coalition, advocated for the passage of the Youth Charging Reform Act for more than a decade.
The final version of the bill is a compromise, Wilkerson said. For years, youth justice advocates have worked to end all automatic charging of young people as adults, but without much luck. This year, the coalition decided to support a gradual approach: the new law removes automatic charging for first-degree assault and misdemeanor handgun offenses.
The process toward passage has been arduous; Wilkerson does expect there to be still some misunderstandings about the new law and what it means in practice. She explained that the new law isn’t fast-tracking a case. Instead, the new law eliminates months of limbo in which children wait for their cases to be assigned.
“When we look at the numbers, it would address roughly 50%, so it takes care of about 50% of the young people who are being charged as adults,” she said. “So we still felt like that was a significant number. That if we could help that many young people, it was still worth it to support that. We feel confident that the results will speak for themselves. We will be able to make a strong case for why this should be done in all cases.”
Holistic programming, violence intervention, trauma-informed care, positive adult mentorship and education, and vocational services are alternatives to addressing crime and violence.
Coupled with a lack of third spaces, young people in Baltimore feel they don’t belong in public spaces and are also experiencing trauma and neglect, Ford explained.
“If youth aren’t getting support for their traumatic experiences, then it shows up in schools,” he said. “It shows up in communities. It shows up everywhere. It shows up in relationships, and those things lead to young people entering the legal system in different capacities.”
That’s why dirt bike culture matters, Harrell said.
“Dirt bikes are a lot of people’s outlet; it’s their getaway, and it’s mine too,” Harrell said. “A lot of my peers, a lot of people that I know, a lot of people from this city love dirt bikes.”
More often than not, children aren’t included in the decision-making around issues that directly impact them. Centering their desires and interests is essential to building their esteem and self-worth, which in turn can have an impact on violence reduction.
As part of this larger reform effort, Harrell, Young, and other dirt bike advocates are pushing for less criminalization and punishment for riders by urging government leaders to develop a designated public dirt bike park — but the entire city, including the media, needs to be accountable for the harm caused by the narrative of criminality, Young, the founder of B-360 said.
“My favorite thing to tell people is I’m born, raised, and never leaving Baltimore,” Young said.
“I wear this accent with pride. I want our media to wear this accent with pride too. They are representative of the voices of the solutions happening in Baltimore, not just the conflicts, not just the struggle. The Baltimore of 10 years ago no longer exists.”