Here's what should concern you: in 2019, New Zealand's justice system failed to properly track 90 community sentences. By 2024, that number had become 5,610.

That's not a typo. Somewhere between conviction and completion, the data on more than five thousand community sentences has simply vanished into administrative black holes marked 'inadequate data available'. (Source: Stats NZ, community-sentences)

The trajectory tells the story. In 2018, 309 sentences lacked adequate tracking. A year later, that dropped to just 90. Then 2020: 93. The system seemed to be getting better at keeping tabs on who was serving what.

Then something broke. By 2022, the number had exploded to 1,977. Two years later, it nearly tripled again to 5,610. You have to go back to 1999 to find a comparable level of data inadequacy in the community sentencing system.

Think about what a community sentence actually is: supervision orders, home detention, community work. These aren't people in cells being counted at morning muster. They're in the community, and the justice system is supposed to know exactly where they are and what conditions they're serving under.

When the data is marked 'inadequate', it means the system can't tell you basic facts about these sentences. Were they completed? Breached? Converted to prison time? Still being served? The records either don't exist, are incomplete, or can't be reliably categorised.

This matters because community sentences are growing as a proportion of all sentencing. Courts increasingly use them as alternatives to prison. But if one in every few dozen community sentences now exists in a data void, how can anyone assess whether they're working?

Politicians on both sides love to cite justice statistics when it suits them. Tough on crime, or crime is falling, depending on which numbers you pick. But nobody's talking about the fact that thousands of sentences have effectively disappeared from the official record.

The contrast is stark: in 2019, the system was tracking community sentences well enough that only 90 fell into the 'inadequate data' category. Five years later, that figure is 62 times higher. Either record-keeping has catastrophically deteriorated, or something fundamental has changed about how sentences are classified and tracked.

When the justice system loses track of 5,610 sentences, that's not a data quality issue. That's a accountability crisis hiding in plain sight in a Stats NZ spreadsheet.