Cultural reports ‘invaluable’

While the costs for court cultural reports are on the rise, an experienced defence lawyer says they provide ‘‘invaluable’’ information which is not being provided by any other source.

Figures recently released by Ministry of Justice under the Official Information Act show a total of 2328 reports, either linked to Legal Aid or the Public Defence Service, were completed in the financial year ending June 30 this year, amounting to $5.91 million.

The spend is close to double the 2020 volume and cost, when 1557 cultural reports were written, at a cost of $3.29m.

Experienced New Plymouth defence lawyer Julian Hannam described the cultural reports as ‘‘invaluable tools’’ which helped the judge better understand the person standing in the dock before them.

‘‘This is information that noone else is providing.’’

Hannam said for all the offenders he represented, a cultural report had resulted in a sentencing reduction.

He provided a range to the Taranaki Daily News, which varied from a 7% to 45% reduction where offenders were given prison terms ranging from 2-11 years.

While the cost of cultural reports was rising because of increased requests, savings were to be made in the Corrections’ budget at the other end if prison terms were being reduced.

It costs about $150,000 each year to keep one person behind bars.

Corrections, which has an annual operating budget of $1.8 billion, employs about 1330 probation officers across the country, and one of their tasks is to write pre-sentence reports for offenders.

Auckland-based barrister Lynn Hughes, who previously worked in Taranaki, said when compared with pre-sentence reports, which could be four-pages long, or less, and based on a checklist of questions, cultural reports provided a more robust account of an offender’s life, along with recommending a tailored intervention plan.

‘‘It’s more of a bespoke type of sentencing where you can target. A lot of the time it’s about breaking the cycle.’’

As a defence lawyer, Hughes said she was focused on putting her clients back on the ‘‘right pathway’’, but the wider goal of the justice system was to ‘‘stop people becoming victims in the first place’’.

Hughes said the trust and rapport a cultural report writer developed with an offender sometimes led to first time disclosures of trauma or abuse, which opened the door to addressing issues.

Corrections’ general manager of probation Darius Fagan said while pre-sentence reports were not in-depth, they outlined the sentencing options to the court, along with how they could be managed.

He said about 22,000 presentence assessments were carried out on average every year, and the rising requests for detailed cultural reports did not flag any issues with the work being done by probation officers.

Fagan said staff were trained to include social and cultural information in their reports, and surveys done with the judiciary in the past two years highlighted improvements made in this area.

As probation officers were ‘‘not typically specialist assessors’’ the court had the ability to seek expert reports prior to sentencing which considered factors like mental health.

‘‘Specialist cultural reports are no different to those.’’