Youth Court Offending Rates

Abstract | Introduction | Method | Results | Conclusion | References | Appendix 1 Area data | Appendix 2 Raw data

Introduction[1]

There are two main indicators of the amount and type of youth offending. “Police offences”
are the number of offences that the Police have attributed to offenders and this is available by
age, sex and ethnicity. It is this data that is most often quoted in the newspapers. When it is
quoted, those using it will often compare it with a single earlier point in time and this point is
often chosen to suit the message that the writer is intending to convey. Thus, prior to the
2002 parliamentary elections, politicians reported rises in youth offending by making
comparisons with 1990 or 1991 when, for various reasons, apprehensions of young people
were down. Had the writers chosen another point in time, they could easily have claimed that
young offending was decreasing - for instance, if they had quoted population adjusted rates
over the last three years.

There are other problems with the Police offences data:

• The actual number of offenders is not available – only the number of offences;
• There is no check on whether or not the offences were committed by a particular young person to whom they are attributed, or that the level and details of charging are appropriate;
• These data have not been able to be related to general population numbers.

A second and potentially more satisfactory source of data is information on Youth Court
appearances. There are three different ways commonly used to report Youth Court statistics.
Until recently, the most commonly available data was based on the number of separate
charges (or information) laid in Youth Court. As a particular offender was often charged
with several offences, the number of charges was not an accurate reflection of the number of
people appearing. A second way of reporting what happens is to collect data on distinct
cases. A distinct case is a specific appearance by one person on either one or groups of
charges laid on a particular date. The third way of reporting data is by counting distinct
offenders . These latter statistics describe the number of different people who appear in a
particular Youth Court on at least one occasion in the course of a year. In the run up to the
2002 elections there were numerous claims in the media that the increased number of charges
laid in the Youth Court, compared with 10 years ago, indicated that the Youth Court was
grossly overloaded and that this was an indication that the system was not being effective in
dealing with young offenders. However, there are many different reasons why there have
been changes in the number of Youth Court charges. Most importantly, data comparing
numbers of charges and numbers of cases show that more charges are now being preferred (on
average) per distinct case. Increases in the numbers of young people in the population and
increased offending across all age groups are other important factors. Furthermore, as this
report will shortly demonstrate, had 1987/88 been chosen as the base year, the headlines could
have claimed that the Youth Court is experiencing great success, as the number of cases has
dropped markedly since then.

There are also other problems with the data from the Youth Court that has been available
previously. For instance, in the Ministry of Justice publications on Sentencing and
Convictions, until recently, the data only gave detailed information on the total number of
charges laid and not the number of cases heard. Nor was information available on the number
of offenders reappearing in the same year, so anecdotal evidence of large numbers of
reappearances of the same young person created alarm and cast doubt on the system. Another
problem with the data was that it was not adjusted for population changes, although in recent
years the population in the most likely offending ages for young people has been increasing.

Now, however, it is possible to examine Youth Court data by the number of distinct cases and
the number of distinct offenders in each particular year. It is also possible to obtain data on
age, sex, ethnicity, outcome and on whether the appearance was the first or a second
appearance in that year. Most of this data is also available separately for each Youth Court.
And we have recently been able to obtain data from Statistics New Zealand, the Department
for Courts, and the New Zealand Police that enables us to examine population rates over recent years in each of the larger Youth Court areas. With these new data it is possible to calculate estimates of the rates at which young people appeared in each Youth Court throughout the country from 1987 to 2001.

In April 2002, the Department for Courts contracted the Crime and Justice Research Centre at
Victoria University of Wellington to undertake an analysis of the new data:

To provide information to the Department for Courts on rates of appearances of distinct offenders and distinct cases for each of the Youth Court areas throughout the country and over time.

Information on the numbers of cases appearing before Youth Courts is important in the
management of the Courts and it also says something about the amount of youth offending
occurring in the area. When information is also available on the number of different
offenders involved in these cases, an estimate of the amount of reoffending occurring locally
in a particular year is also provided. When this information is available, over time, trends can
be analysed, especially when the data can be related to the number of young people in each
Youth Court area.

Footnote

1 Acknowledgements: The Principal Youth Court Judge, Judge Andrew Becroft was responsible
for proposing and facilitating this study. Critical information was supplied by the New Zealand Police (Derek Cooper), Statistics New Zealand, Ministry of Justice (Philip Spier) and Department for Courts (Wayne Goodall and Sue Triggs), Leo Williams assisted with analysis of the data. Jeremy Robertson read and commented on the final draft. Our thanks to all these people for their advice and support, and to Angela Lee of the Department for Courts who managed the project contract.