While police retreat from hostile groups at car meets and the government announces move-on orders for town centres nationwide, there's a number buried in Youth Court data that nobody's talking about: 1,467 adult sentences were handed down to young people in 2024, more than double the 942 recorded just three years earlier. (Source: Stats NZ, youth-court-orders)

Here's what happened. In 2019, before COVID, Youth Courts handed down 688 adult sentences to young offenders. That's the baseline. Then 2020 hit, lockdowns happened, and the number more than doubled overnight to 1,476. Suddenly the Youth Court was sentencing young people as adults at twice the pre-pandemic rate.

You'd expect a spike during COVID chaos, then a return to normal. That's not what the data shows.

In 2021, adult sentences dropped sharply to 942. For a brief moment, it looked like courts were pulling back. Maybe the pandemic spike was temporary. Maybe judges were finding alternatives to adult sentencing.

Then 2022 arrived and the number jumped to 1,530. By 2023 it hit 1,599, the highest on record. In 2024 it pulled back slightly to 1,467, but that's still 111% above 2019 levels. The new normal is double the old normal.

What changed? The Crimes Act didn't. The voting age didn't. COVID restrictions ended. But Youth Courts are now routinely handing down adult sentences at rates that would have been extraordinary five years ago.

This matters because adult sentences for young people mean prison time in adult facilities, criminal records that follow you for life, and a justice system that's decided rehabilitation isn't the priority anymore. When a 17-year-old gets an adult sentence, they're not going to a youth justice facility designed around education and reintegration. They're going to prison.

The political conversation right now is about homelessness, car meets, and whether police have enough powers. Fair enough. But while we argue about move-on orders, Youth Courts have quietly shifted how they treat young offenders, and the numbers show it's not shifting back.

In 2019, if a young person ended up in Youth Court, there was roughly a one-in-three chance they'd be sentenced as an adult for serious offending. Today, based on the trajectory since 2022, that ratio has fundamentally changed. We're sentencing young people as adults at double the rate we did before COVID, and nobody's asking why.

The Taranaki car meet made headlines. The 1,467 adult sentences handed down to young people last year didn't. One involved police retreating. The other involves the justice system doubling down. The data doesn't care which story gets more clicks.