“I Would See Young People Lose Hope”: California May Restrict Probation on Children

As her 16th birthday approached, Sunday thought that she might finally get off probation. She had already been on court-ordered monitoring and restrictions in Alameda County, California, since she was 12, and had spent years catching the bus to fulfill the various requirements, making check-ins with her probation officer and attending gang prevention programs at the sheriff’s office. 

Some of the conditions made her feel publicly humiliated and targeted, like the random visits from officers while she was in school. “It was kind of like, ‘Oh, you’re here to come see like the bad kid,’ so it just made me feel kind of like an outsider at my school, so that was also dehumanizing,” Sunday told Bolts. “It wasn’t like, ‘How are you really doing? Have you eaten? Do you need a hug? How is your family doing?’ It was just more surveillance, like, ‘Did you do this? Did you do that? Did you stay away from here?’”

Sunday, who asked that Bolts not use her real name, remembers that some of the conditions were hard to understand as a child. “The conditions are very lengthy, the language is very wordy, very inaccessible,” she said. When she was told about the various requirements in court, she was so nervous and intimidated that they “went from one ear out the other.” 

But in her check-in with a probation officer right before she turned 16 years old, Sunday was found to be in violation of one of her conditions and sent to juvenile hall. After she got out, it wasn’t long before another violation tripped her up, and officials ordered her back to juvenile hall when she was 17 years old. She spent more than 200 days in juvenile detention that time, past her 18th birthday. 

Sunday, who is now 25 and applying to colleges, was forced to have her high school graduation in a small multi-purpose room filled with correctional staff instead of people from her community. She was only allowed two attendees. There was no stage, no balloons.

“I couldn’t have a normal high school graduation,” she said.

With random check-ins and conditions stacked on top of conditions, from an ankle monitor to the court-mandated police lectures, Sunday said that it felt like punishment had swallowed up her middle school years. And in some ways it did: Because there wasn’t a clear deadline or timeline for when her probation term would end, she was punished with those conditions on and off from the time she was 12 until she was 18. 

In California, it isn’t uncommon for minors to be put on probation for extended and unspecified periods of time, with anywhere from 5 to 50 different probation conditions they may have to follow. Like Sunday, many describe the conditions as humiliating and say they can hinder their ability to complete school or maintain jobs to help support their family. 

In California, probation is the most common contact youth have with the criminal legal system. In 2023, more than 10,000 young people were placed on wardship probation, meaning they are under state custody. Young people of color are disproportionately punished, comprising 86 percent of California youth put on wardship probation. For the more than 6,000 youth put on probation in their community, the average probation term lasted nearly two years, according to state data. 

California lawmakers have tried to limit the length of time children spend on probation, passing legislation in 2022 to create a presumption that minors cannot serve terms longer than six months. Courts would still have been able to extend probation conditions an additional six months, though this would take a hearing process and a judge finding it in the child’s best interest, with no limit to the number of times that probation could be extended. 

That measure, however, was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom. In his veto statement, Newsom said he was concerned about adding to a larger shift that was still occurring at the time in the state’s juvenile justice system, thanks to a “realignment” law he signed the previous year that closed down the state’s remaining youth prisons and put youth custody in the hands of county probation departments. 

“As counties prepare for the full implementation of realignment, I am concerned that changes to the juvenile justice system, like those outlined in this legislation, create additional workload for the courts and probation during realignment,” Newsom wrote. “I am also concerned about costs driven by the increased number of hearings, the courts estimate that this increased workload will cost millions of dollars.”

Advocates argue that the implementation of the bill would have actually saved money by reducing probation departments’ case load. The National Center for Youth Law estimated that the net cost saving created by these measures could exceed $80 million dollars after implementation.

This year, Assemblymember Mia Bonta refiled the 2021 measure to limit probation terms on minors, with Assembly Bill 1376. 

Bonta, who says current probation conditions are often overbearing or unreasonable, explained that the legislation also aims to make officials impose conditions that are individually tailored and developmentally appropriate..

“We’re dealing with youth where there should be some recognition of what’s developmentally appropriate, what they can access in terms of being able to actually fulfill and we should make it personalized towards what their particular experiences, as opposed to a long laundry list of things that may or may not be within their ability to actually achieve,” Bonta said.

The state Assembly’s Committee on Public Safety advanced AB 1376 last week; it amended the bill to set the presumptive cap on probation at nine months, instead of the six months in the 2021 version. Many law enforcement groups, including the California District Attorneys’ Associations and the State Coalition of Probation Organizations, opposed the bill in committee. 

The reform still has to pass the full Assembly and then the state Senate, before it can head back to Newsom’s desk. Newsom’s office declined to comment.  

Sunday now does advocacy work with a community based program called the Youth Power Zone, which offers youth leadership opportunities and a safe space for young people. She says Bonta’s bill would make officials slow down and make better decisions for young people. Studies have shown that peer influence, instability at home, abuse or neglect, future uncertainty, and a lack of future expectations have an effect on youth becoming involved in the criminal legal system.

Sunday said that young people who are struggling and put on probation need conditions that actually help them with rehabilitation and “addressing the root causes of why the young person even entered such a system in the first place.” 

Dafna Gozani, director of legislative and policy strategies at the National Center for Youth Law, said that even though the bill would require a nine month probation check-in with the youth, the check-in can still be held before that time period. She said she hopes that once this bill passes, practice will align with guidance from experts, such as the National Council of Family and Juvenile Court Judges and the Urban Institute, to set the earliest possible review hearings before the mandated nine month period so that youth are not needlessly languishing on probation. 

“Ultimately, the provisions of the bill are a vast improvement over what most youth are experiencing in California and we are grateful to Assemblymember Bonta’s office for her dedication and support to AB 1376 and to California’s youth,” Gozani said.

Gozani said juvenile probation affects a young person’s whole family. Gozani, who used to represent children on probation as a staff attorney with Bay Area Legal Aid’s Youth Justice Team, says she’s met parents who lost jobs trying to keep up with all the meetings and appointments they had to make sure their kids met.

“While some people may think that’s benign, probation is not a neutral experience,” Gozani said. “It is onerous. It has massive implications for families, and we know that even a short amount of time in the justice system causes harm to young people, and so we should be doing everything to minimize that harm.”

Gozani says the looming threat imposed by those conditions is palpable for families with a child on probation. While the conditions can have little or nothing to do with the reason a minor landed in court, nearly any violation could result in them going to juvenile detention. Gozani recalls seeing young people who violated a condition that would typically not be punishable by incarceration winding up in juvenile hall for extended periods of time.

She says she has seen children go to juvenile hall for missing a check-in, being late to school or violating curfew. In one of her previous cases, a young person accused of nonviolent offenses was sent to juvenile hall because they crossed county lines to visit their grandparent. She says extended time under these restrictions has “an impact on the kids’ psyche, they start viewing themselves as a bad kid after a while.”

“I would just see young people lose hope,” Gozani told Bolts. “They would be doing their best. They would be juggling all of these conditions. They wouldn’t be able to be doing the things that really helped them thrive, like get a job or engage in sports.”

Other states have more restrictions on probation than California, which may include age limits or how long a youth can be sentenced. In 2023, Tennessee passed similar legislation to limit youth probation to six months.

Gozani said that when she represented children in Colorado before moving to California, her clients always had an end date which provided a benchmark that helped her know how to work with them and achieve their goals.

“I moved to California, and I immediately saw the implications of what it means not to have that hope and to not really know where the finish line is, but you’re being told to continuously run this race,” Gozani said.

Jahzara Halliday, a 22 year old organizer with the Youth Justice Coalition, was on probation for a year and six months, up until around the time she aged out of the juvenile system at 18. During her time on probation, she was only allowed out of her house from six in the morning to six in the evening, and since she didn’t drive, there was always a pressure of making it to the bus on time. She wasn’t assigned a probation officer for six months, and she remembered that initially it was random officers she didn’t know “just popping up” at her school and house. At one point, they made her take a drug test even though her case had nothing to do with drugs.

“Neither one of my cases was drug related,” Halliday said. “She was just literally trying to find any reason. At the time I was a kid, so I honestly wasn’t even doing anything at that time, but she was just picking with me.”

Like Sunday, Halliday felt her probation officer didn’t care about her or her problems at home. She said people at her school and friends’ families treated her differently because she was on probation, and she still has trauma from the experience.

While they support this year’s bill limiting juvenile probation terms, advocates like Halliday are also pushing for more community-based resources and connections to rehabilitate and support youth. 

She said that while she was on probation, she couldn’t open up to any of the probation department staff or judges on her case because she felt like they didn’t care about her or offer any support “for me to actually hurry up and get off probation.” She did find that support, however, after getting involved with the Youth Justice Coalition, a nonprofit organization that works with currently and formerly incarcerated youth. Halliday says she got so close to a therapist there who she now sees her as a mother figure. She says the therapist helped her understand the root causes of her trauma and how bullying she experienced caused her to act out, leading to the events that resulted in her probation.

Halliday says she was still closed off to others when a gardening teacher at Youth Justice Coalition broke through her shell. The man eventually became a mentor, inspiring her to get into youth organizing. She took over the gardening program when the teacher died in 2021.

Halliday highlighted the importance of community-based support and resources to help youth meet their educational, mental, and physical needs to avoid contact with the system.

“If the resource is not provided, you could get caught up in six months,” Halliday said. “You could get recycled in six months. The resources provided have to be from every aspect. Like you can’t just do education, mental, physical, like it has to be every aspect an individualized plan.”

“I could have been recycled back into the system as an adult,” Halliday said. “I still have the same stuff going on that was going on when I was a youth. I just choose to do different because I have the resources. I have the people in my corner that’s going to sit and listen to me.”

Update 5/8/25: Bonta’s office updated the average length of juvenile probation terms after this story was first published.