Statistics Canada Reports on Youth and Adult Courts

While I was away on vacation for the past three weeks, Statistics Canada released two reports on the Canadian court system:

• Youth court statistics (2008/2009): "Youth courts in Canada processed 58,379 cases involving 191,054 charges in 2008/2009. This represents a slight decrease in the caseload from a year earlier. The youth court caseload has been relatively stable since 2004/2005.The number of cases processed in 2008/2009 was 23% lower than in 2002/2003, the year prior to enactment of the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA)."
• Adult criminal court statistics (2008/2009): "Adult criminal courts in Canada completed more than 390,000 cases in 2008/2009, involving nearly 1.2 million charges. The number of cases was virtually the same as a year earlier, but about 3% higher than in 2006/2007. Before then, criminal court caseloads had been declining for four years. The most frequently occurring cases were for impaired driving (11%), theft (10%), common assault (9%), failure to comply with a court order (9%) and breach of probation (8%). Combined, these five offences accounted for almost half of all cases disposed of in adult criminal courts across the country."