While Gloriavale's Howard Temple appeals his jail sentence and courts worry about AI deepfakes, here's what's actually happening in New Zealand's justice system: we're convicting fewer people in their late twenties than at any point in the past two decades.

In 2020, courts convicted 725,236 New Zealanders aged 25 to 29. Four years later, that number sits at 593,492. That's an 18% drop. Not a slight decline. Not a statistical blip. A fundamental shift in who ends up in front of a judge. (Source: Ministry of Justice, adults-convicted-by-sentence)

Go back further and the story gets clearer. In 1991, during the height of New Zealand's crime wave, courts were convicting people at rates we haven't seen since. Then came the slow grind downward through the 2000s. By 2010, convictions had plateaued around 700,000. They held steady for a decade.

Then COVID hit. Not just the virus, but everything that came with it: lockdowns, economic uncertainty, a justice system that ground to a near halt. In 2021, convictions dropped to 624,964. The next year, 617,188. Then 611,992. Now 593,492.

That's not courts catching up on a backlog. That's five consecutive years of decline. Every single year since the pandemic started, fewer New Zealanders in this age group have been convicted of crimes.

This matters because 25 to 29 is the tail end of peak offending years. Criminologists have known for decades that most criminal careers start in the late teens and taper off by the early thirties. This age group catches people right before they age out of crime. What you see here is what's coming next for the entire adult justice system.

And what you see is a system processing fewer people every year. Not because police stopped arresting. Not because prosecutors stopped charging. Because fewer New Zealanders in their late twenties are committing the kinds of offences that land you in court.

Compare that to the noise. Politicians talking tough on crime. Headlines about ram raids and youth offending. Courts considering mobile courthouses to deal with demand. Meanwhile, the actual conviction data shows a justice system dealing with 132,000 fewer cases than it was four years ago in this single age bracket alone.

This doesn't mean crime has vanished. It doesn't mean every category is falling. It means the big picture, the one that politicians ignore when it suits them, shows fewer young adults ending up convicted than at any point since the dataset began tracking properly in the 1990s.

The courts have real problems. AI fakery is one of them. Backlogs are another. But shrinking conviction numbers? That's not a crisis. That's the opposite.