Youth justice stats unsound

The Ministry of Justice released the Youth Justice Indicators report recently, which stated that the youth justice system ‘‘generally continued to perform well’’. But a problem arises when you have more than a cursory glance at the media soundbites and the misleading statistics which they claim show a ‘‘reduction in offending’’.

How can our youth justice system be ‘‘performing well’’ when 70 per cent of all 16-yearold offenders end up in adult court within two years? So more than two-thirds of all 16-year-old youth offenders who are processed through our ‘‘world-class’’ youth court end up offending as adults. Not only do they end up offending as adults but they do so at such a level that they are put through district court. What is also not being reported is that this reoffending rate has been steadily increasing since 2010.

Even more questions are raised when you have a look at the adult court reoffending rate being just 42 per cent. How can our adult district court have a much lower reoffending rate than our world-class and so-called performing youth court?

The message we get from the Ministry of Justice is that our youth system is the best in the world and is performing well because we are seeing a drop in youth offending. What is contradictory, and funnily enough not reported on again, is that youth who are committing serious crimes has increased since 2010. In fact, in 2017 it had increased by almost 10 per cent.

So, how can we have an increasing reoffending rate, two-thirds of young offenders going on to offend as adults, and an increase in serious offending by youth being labelled a ‘‘performing youth justice system’’?

Here’s the rub. The report purports to show the ‘‘what’’ with zero explanation as to the ‘‘why’’.

The reality is the statistics and methodology of reporting ‘‘youth crime’’ has been changed, chopped, manipulated and twisted to such a degree that no real comparisons can be made over the past 10 or more years.

In 2014, the official youth crime rate was measured by the number of youth entering the youth court every year. If you look closely at the report, there is no mention of an official youth crime rate at all. The then National Government changed the way youth crime was measured and the different categories of offences, making it impossible to accurately compare or show trends.

The evidence for even more changes of the statistics is actually written in the report itself.

In the fine print at the bottom of every page it states: ‘‘Numbers and rates from 2015-2018 should be interpreted with caution. In June 2016 and June 2018 some police districts undertook exercises to ensure records were up-to-date ... these updates primarily affected non-court actions against youth.

‘‘Additionally, in 2018 a change was made to how youth offending is recorded in police systems, which currently obscures non-court proceeding decisions.’’

Add to all of this, the fact that when the report records ‘‘youth offending’’ it also notes in the fine print that: ‘‘Each 14-16 year-old is counted only once in each 12-month period’’. That means that a youth offender who counts towards the ‘‘offending rates’’ could offend multiple times but only ever be counted once.

The truth is that nothing has changed in the youth justice system. It is demonstrably not stopping the offenders from going on and reoffending – which surely is the main aim for any court system.

The youth justice system is failing when serious offending is increasing and when two-thirds of young offenders end up in adult court.

We need to stop buying into this rhetoric of our youth system being the best in the world and we need to stop cherry-picking statistics that only suit that narrative.

* Darroch Ball is a NZ First list MP based in Manawatu¯ .