Everyone has an opinion about whether New Zealand is "tough enough" on crime. The left says rehabilitation works. The right says consequences matter. Nobody's talking about the 2,933 people who actually completed court-ordered non-violence programmes in 2024/2025. (Source: Ministry of Justice, family-violence — 1.Non-violence programmes)

These aren't people who volunteered for anger management. These are people a judge looked at and said: you need this programme, or you're going to prison. Family violence offenders. Assault convictions. People who hurt someone badly enough that the justice system stepped in.

That's eight people finishing these programmes every single day. Eight people learning to recognise their triggers, manage their anger, understand the harm they caused. Whether you think that's "soft on crime" or evidence the system works depends entirely on your politics. But the number itself tells you something: New Zealand courts are using these programmes, consistently, at scale.

The thing about family violence is that it doesn't show up in the crime statistics the way stranger assaults do. It happens behind closed doors. It gets minimised, excused, hidden. By the time someone ends up court-ordered into a non-violence programme, there's usually a long history — calls that didn't result in charges, incidents that got smoothed over, warnings that went unheeded.

So when nearly 3,000 people complete these programmes in a single year, you're looking at the visible tip of a much larger problem. These are the cases that made it to court. The ones where evidence was strong enough, harm was serious enough, or the pattern was clear enough that a judge intervened.

And here's the part nobody wants to hear: we don't know what happens next. The Ministry of Justice tracks completions, not outcomes. It doesn't tell us how many of these 2,933 people never reoffend. It doesn't tell us how many are back in court within a year. It doesn't tell us whether these programmes actually work, or whether they're just an expensive way to make judges feel like they tried something.

What it does tell us is that New Zealand is putting serious resources into intervention. Nearly 3,000 programme completions means thousands of hours of facilitation, assessment, monitoring. It means the justice system believes — or at least hopes — that some people can change their behaviour if you make them confront it.

Whether that hope is justified is the question the data can't answer. But ignoring these numbers because they don't fit a neat political narrative doesn't help anyone. Least of all the people living with someone who just finished one of these programmes.