Last year, as a new law went into effect requiring Maryland’s corrections department to build a center for incarcerated women nearing release from prison, attorney Bob Burgoyne was hearing from advocates that it wasn’t happening. Bringing his legal talent to bear, he filed a public records request for more information in July 2023.

That was the start of a year-and-a-half-long silent treatment that continues to this day, culminating in a lawsuit recently filed by Burgoyne’s law firm, Perkins Coie LLP, in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City. The law firm filed a complaint against the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, which it says has yet to produce a single document in response to its request, for “knowingly and willfully failing to disclose records in compliance with its obligations under the Maryland Public Information Act.”

That complaint was filed after an unsuccessful appeal to the state’s public records mediation board and a separate lawsuit, filed with the state’s Public Information Act Compliance Board, Burgoyne said. That board, he said, then issued an order requiring the corrections department to produce records.

“To my surprise, even that didn’t do anything,” Burgoyne said. “That was of course frustrating, so now we’ve had to go to the court to try and get these records.”

The corrections department declined to comment on the lawsuit or whether it has created the pre-release center for incarcerated women as required by state law.

Leigh Goodmark, a professor at The University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law who works with incarcerated women, said in an email that the corrections department offers multiple “pre-release units” for men, but none for women.

The state has one women’s prison, the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women, or MCI-W, which opened in 1936. According to the corrections department’s latest report, from 2023, the facility’s average daily population ranged between 750-800 incarcerated women prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, but has since dropped to about 569.

So-called pre-release units give those incarcerated the ability to more easily participate in work release programs, provide comprehensive assistance for returning home from prison, and allow prisoners to “step down to a less restrictive environment where they can interact more freely with those who will support them upon release,” Goodmark said.

“Given that most of the women at MCI-W are going to return to the community, they should have as much preparation and as many resources to ensure their success as possible,” she said.

Goodmark said the women at that facility have been “waiting eagerly for the pre-release unit to open since the General Assembly passed the pre-release legislation in 2021.”

“That it hasn’t happened yet, and that the women leaving MCI-W have not had the benefit of a well-developed pre-release program, is a problem,” Goodmark said. “And that DCSPS has not responded to repeated requests about the status of that project is a problem too.”

Burgoyne said he along with advocates for the pre-release center did not want to resort to a lawsuit.

“Their hope and our hope has always been that we could get this collaboratively resolved and get the facility built in an orderly and timely manner,” he said.

The law requiring the corrections department to build a pre-release unit called for a “comprehensive rehabilitative pre-release facility for female inmates” and that the facility would be located in “an area, defined by the zip codes where the largest percentage of inmates will likely be released,” according to a legislative synopsis. It also required the department to complete certain phases of the project by certain dates.

Burgoyne said it was important to recognize that, under the status quo, the women who are in pre-release status in the prison system are housed in a maximum-security facility, which means added security at every turn.

“It’s just a vastly inferior experience for women that is nowhere near comparable to what men in pre-release status enjoy in the Maryland prison system,” he said.