Lowering California’s transfer standard under AB 2040 would send more teens to adult prison, increasing recidivism and denying needed rehabilitation services.
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I was 16 years old when a California court sentenced me to 31 years to life in an adult maximum-security prison. There were no programs designed for youth, and no counseling for the wounds I carried that led me to prison. What I found inside instead was violence, isolation and trauma layered upon trauma.
Once, a guard looked at me and said, “Hey youngster, do yourself a favor and hang yourself. You’re never getting out of here.”
Adult prison did not heal my traumas, it buried them deeper. Yet I survived and came home, proving what research, faith and lived experience all tell us: Young people have a tremendous capacity to change.
Unfortunately, a bill currently moving through the California legislature bets against that.
Assembly Bill 2040, authored by Assemblymember Alexandra Macedo, R-Visalia, lowers the evidentiary standard a court must meet before sending a child to adult court. Under current law, a judge must find by “clear and convincing evidence” that a young person cannot be rehabilitated in the juvenile system — a deliberately high bar that reflects the California Supreme Court’s own recognition that transfer is the most severe punishment the juvenile system can impose.
AB 2040 would replace that bar with “preponderance of the evidence,” the lowest standard in California law (essentially, more likely than not). I will be testifying against this bill before the Assembly Public Safety Committee this month.
Under AB 2040, any 16 or 17-year-old charged with a felony could be sent to adult court. The case for sending more children to adult prison rests on the idea that harsher punishment produces safer communities. But research overwhelmingly says that is simply not true, and skips over something anyone who has worked with young people knows: kids change. They grow. Given real support and real opportunity, they can become remarkable people.
Research shows that youth incarcerated in adult facilities recidivate more often, reoffend faster, commit more offenses and have longer criminal careers than peers who remained in the juvenile system. The Department of Justice’s own research reached the same conclusion, finding that transfer laws have produced the unintended effect of increasing recidivism.
Youth in the juvenile system are less likely to reoffend, in part because California law requires juvenile facilities to provide schooling, mental health services and family engagement. Adult prisons carry no such mandate, and rarely deliver them. Sending a teenager into that environment doesn’t address what brought them there; it simply removes the very tools most likely to bring them back.
I am living proof of what is possible when a person is not written off.
While incarcerated, I earned six associate degrees with honors and co-founded a peer mentoring program. When I came home after 25 years, I worked two jobs to put myself through college and graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in sociology from San Francisco State University.
What I achieved should not be the exception, it should be the expectation.
California currently requires courts to meet a “clear and convincing” evidentiary standard before transfer. That standard is already eroding. Just a few years ago, about 14% of transfer hearings ended with a child being sent to adult court. Today that number has nearly doubled to 27%, according to the California Office of Youth and Community Restoration.
The trend is quickly moving in the wrong direction, and AB 2040 would make it worse. Brain science confirms that young people are not fixed. They grow and are capable of taking responsibility, making amends and becoming someone different from the person who made a terrible mistake.
Lawmakers must oppose AB 2040 and, instead, raise the evidentiary standard so that courts have to be truly certain before putting a child on the path I was forced to walk.
J Vasquez is policy director at Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice. He is a formerly incarcerated advocate working on criminal and juvenile justice reform in California.
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