Corrections has ended contracts with iwi organisations providing bail beds and wraparound support, leaving only 10 funded bail beds, as reported by RNZ, while the remand prison population keeps climbing. That is the direction of travel in New Zealand justice right now: fewer community options, more people held.

So here is a number from the other end of the system. In 2025, the Youth Court handed down 93 adult sentences across all offence types. That is the highest count since 2011 (Source: Stats NZ, youth-court-orders). Up from 75 the year before. Up from 27 in 2019.

Read that on its own and you would think young offenders are being dealt with more harshly than at any time in living memory. Now look at the rest of the table.

In 1997, the Youth Court handed down 330 adult sentences. In 1993 it was 267. In 2000, 261. Right through the 1990s and 2000s, the count sat in the hundreds, drifting down slowly: 183 in 2005, 156 in 2008, 147 in 2010. Then the floor fell out. 93 in 2011. 63 in 2012. By 2015 it was 33, and by 2019 just 27.

Here is the finding that matters. The quietest year of the old era, 2010 at 147, is still comfortably above the busiest year of the new one. Every single year from 2011 onward sits below every single year from 1992 to 2010. Not one exception. The 2025 figure that reads as a 14-year high is 37 percent below the lowest pre-2011 year, and 28 percent of the 1997 peak.

The most likely reading is that something structural changed around 2010 and 2011 in how the Youth Court disposes of cases, not that a generation of teenagers suddenly reformed and then unreformed. A drop from 147 to 63 in two years is too fast to be behaviour. It looks like process. What has happened since 2019 is a partial return toward that new normal, not a return to the old one.

The honest counter-argument: these are small numbers, and small numbers move violently. Stats NZ randomly rounds these counts to a base of three, which is why every figure in the series is divisible by three. A swing of 18 orders takes you from 75 to 93 and generates a "14-year high" headline. The 2025 figure may also be provisional or cover a partial reporting period, and the series counts orders, not individual young people, so one person can appear more than once. None of that changes the shape of the 33-year line, but it should temper how much weight you put on any single year.

My view, and I will own it as opinion: if you are going to argue youth justice has gone soft, this series is the wrong evidence, and if you are going to argue young offenders are being crushed by the adult system, it is the wrong evidence for that too. The count went up last year. It is still running at roughly a third of what New Zealand considered normal for two straight decades.