Youth Justice – how we're doing
We are committed to supporting young people, whānau and victims of youth crime to restore their mana.
The graphs below show how we are performing across several measures.
Note: 17 year olds became a part of the Youth Justice System as at 1 July 2019. This is denoted in the charts as a dotted line. Please note this means that the populations before and after the line are not comparable as more young people are included in the latest quarter. The inclusion of 17 years may impact on the trends below as 17 year olds may offend in different ways and may have a longer history of offence.
COVID-19 may have impacted the June, September and December 2020 quarters. This is due to the alert level restrictions first implemented at the end of March 2020.

Support following offending

The proportion of young people referred to Oranga Tamariki Youth Justice once and not subsequently re-referred (blue section of bar) has been growing over the past two years to 47 percent. In total, 76 percent of young people with a past Youth Justice referral had no contact with us this quarter, a slight improvement from 74 percent during the previous quarter.
Re-offending

The number of FGCs held overall has decreased this quarter following a large increase last quarter, which was driven by the lifting of face-to-face gatherings restrictions under higher COVID-19 Alert Levels. Young people for whom it was their first FGC, or who have had 2-4 FGCs in their lifetime, made up the majority (76 percent) of all FGCs in the quarter.

Less restrictive placements

The number of young people in custody has increased in the latest quarter. All placement types have seen an increase. The number in custody in December 2020 is still significantly less than in the December quarter of the previous year.
Note: Work is underway to query the Police Custody figure as it does not align with other data sources
Shorter placements

The average placement length of length in residence has reduced significantly in the last quarter from 47.6 days to 26.4 days. This figure is calculated from placements closed in the quarter. Following COVID-19 more longer term placements than average were closed in June 2020 and September 2020. This may have led to fewer longer term placements closing in the latest quarter which has significantly dropped the average length.

Initial case decision

Shares of each outcome type have fluctuated slightly over time. For the vast majority of cases, young people are released on bail after their first court appearance. On average, 390 cases are closed each quarter.
Escalation of bail

Of the finalised cases where a young person was released on bail, the number that subsequently remain on bail, are remanded, or offend fluctuates slightly over the quarters. However, those who stayed on bail with no offence still make up half of all statuses for the quarter despite an increase in the amount of cases processed.
Published: December 15, 2020