A 23-year-old appearing in court today is part of a shrinking crowd. In 2024, courts convicted 482,080 adults aged 20 to 24. Four years earlier, at the height of COVID restrictions, that number was 631,808.

That's a 24% drop in young adult convictions while courts worry about AI deepfakes and the Ministry of Justice considers mobile courthouses to improve access. The justice system is adapting to new technology threats, but it's also dealing with something else: fewer young people ending up in front of a judge. (Source: Ministry of Justice, adults-convicted-by-sentence)

The decline isn't new. Young adult convictions peaked in 2020, then fell sharply to 525,284 in 2021. They kept falling: 515,396 in 2022, 487,048 in 2023, and now 482,080 in 2024. That's 150,000 fewer convictions in four years.

This matters because the 20-24 age group has historically been overrepresented in the criminal justice system. Young adults are meant to be the high-risk cohort: impulsive, less risk-averse, more likely to offend. But something has shifted. Either fewer young people are committing crimes, or fewer are being caught and convicted, or both.

The timing is telling. The steepest drop happened between 2020 and 2021, right as New Zealand emerged from lockdowns. Some of that might be COVID disruption: fewer opportunities to offend, court backlogs, police prioritising serious crime. But the numbers kept falling even as life returned to normal.

Compare this to the 44-year dataset. In 1980, when this data began, the justice system looked completely different. The recent trajectory suggests we're now in uncharted territory for young adult convictions in the modern era.

What we don't know from this data: whether this reflects a genuine crime reduction, changes in policing priorities, diversion programmes keeping young offenders out of court, or court capacity constraints. The Ministry of Justice doesn't break down conviction data by offence type within age groups, so we can't tell if it's petty crime disappearing or serious offending dropping.

What we do know: the justice system is processing significantly fewer young adults than it was four years ago. While politicians argue about being tough or soft on crime, and while courts adapt to AI-generated evidence, the actual volume of young people being convicted has quietly dropped by nearly a quarter.

That's either very good news about youth offending, or a sign that the system is operating differently than it used to. Either way, it's the story nobody's mentioning while debating criminal justice reform.