We’re honored to share an op-ed that originally appeared in the Albuquerque Journal on May 31, 2026.
It is co-authored by Eric Ontiveros and Joshua Hernandez, who spent decades incarcerated before coming home. Today, both serve the Las Cruces community, working to help young people avoid the violence and pressures that once shaped their own lives. They are joined on the piece by Logan Howard, director of community impact at FYI+.
You can read the original op-ed at the link below, and we’ve also included the full text here for those may have missed its publication.
Why Sending Kids to Prison Doesn’t Make Us Safer
On May 4, the Albuquerque Journal published an op-ed by state Sen. Crystal Brantley, R-Elephant Butte, in support of legislation she proposed that did not pass in the 2026 session. This is a response, co-authored by people in Las Cruces who were incarcerated as children, some sent to adult prison, alongside advocates and service providers committed to root-cause solutions to public safety.
Among other reforms, Brantley’s proposed legislation would expand the definition of “serious youthful offender,” a designation that triggers automatic prosecution and sentencing of children in adult court. Let’s be honest about what that means. It doesn’t create more options for how the system responds to a child in crisis. It requires the harshest response available and takes others off the table. Once that designation is applied, the door to treating children as children closes automatically. Some of us have walked through that door, and we are telling you plainly: What is on the other side does not make children safer, and it does not make communities safer.
Brantley describes a conveyor belt: a system that watches young people escalate without meaningful response until it is too late. We have seen that too. We have lived it. And she is right that it has to change. But the conveyor belt doesn’t run because consequences aren’t harsh enough. It runs because the interventions that actually work (accessible mental health care, stable housing, peer support, family support, mentorship, connection to opportunity) are chronically underfunded and difficult to access.
We grew up in the Mesilla Valley in the 1990s and early 2000s. Our childhoods were shaped by communities where the biggest opportunities for young people were offered by gangs; where family and community members found purpose and belonging through gangs; and where so many people around us ended up in prison that it felt like an inevitable future we simply embraced. And our eventual arrest and incarceration as kids, whether in juvenile facilities or adult prisons, did more to solidify the path we were on than to disrupt it.
When a young person makes dangerous and harmful choices, it is a warning sign that critical needs for safety, belonging and stability are going unmet. The appropriate response is resources and repair. What Las Cruces and our surrounding rural communities need is sustained investment in the infrastructure of safety: municipal jobs programs that give young people income and purpose, after-school programming in arts and athletics, accessible behavioral health resources, social-emotional learning in schools and early family-focused intervention before crises develop. For young people who have caused harm, restorative processes that require them to face the full weight of what they did and make genuine repair have been shown to reduce reoffending and provide more meaningful healing for victims than traditional prosecution.
Not everyone survives prison, especially those sent there as children. We were lucky to make it through — not because of the state’s response to our struggles, but despite it. Today, we work in our community supporting others returning home from prison. Like many people who have experienced transformation, we are committed to helping young people make safe choices. We are raising families here, and we want more than ever for this to be a safe community for our children.
Young people are dying from gun violence and this demands an urgent response, but one that will actually work. We are ready to partner to build a safe community. But we must reject reactionary policies if we truly want justice and safety for youth, their families and our whole community.
Eric Ontiveros and Joshua Hernandez each entered prison at a young age and spent decades incarcerated. Both now serve the Las Cruces community to steer young people away from violence. Logan Howard is the director of community impact at FYI+.
https://www.abqjournal.com/opinion/opinion-restoration-over-incarceration-a-response-to-sen-brantley/3050108