Transcript
Cultural reports are prepared for judges before they sentence an offender, and give insight into their personal, whanau and community background.
They explain how someone came to commit a crime and how further offending could be prevented - sometimes resulting in a lesser sentence.
Judges and lawyers have realised how useful they can be and they've grown in popularity.
The president of the Pacific Lawyer's Association Tania Sharkey says the funding cut came as a shock.
"Halting that funding has far-reaching consequences for our community. I think as a legal profession we were just concerned because we know the benefits that those reports can have and the fact that the large overwhelming majority of our community can't afford those reports privately and not all are entitled to legal aid."
Cultural reports are done by experts who don't work for Corrections and can cost anywhere between$800 and $6000.
And even though offenders should have been paying for the reports themselves, or getting legal aid, judges have been ordering them and the Ministry of Justice has been paying.
Last July, the Ministry wrote to Chief High Court Judge Justice Venning, asking him to clarify why the reports were being ordered.
The Ministry went on to say that it couldn't pay for them.
In a statement Justice Venning said that the Sentencing Act is clear and doesn't give judges the power to order cultural reports.
"My understanding is that Judges may have resorted to directing cultural reports under section 27 as some felt they were not receiving sufficient assistance about cultural information and related information from the standard pre-sentence reports under section 26."
After that, judges were told to stop ordering the reports.
But Khylee Quince from AUT's law school says they are badly needed because the pre-sentencing reports written by probation officers just aren't good enough.
"Probation officers who are writing reports should also basically have a fire lit under them to say do your job properly. Fifty per cent of all of the people you're seeing are Maori; what relevance is that to the fact that they're here and many of them are here year after year with really long patterns of offending and you don't mention any of that."
Having written more than a hundred cultural reports over the past three years, Ms Quince says the backdrop to a criminal's offending is almost always the same.
"These are people that have caused terrible harms to other people but I have yet to come across someone in that offending group that has not had horrific harms perpetrated on them too. The total Once Were Warriers background; that would be the standard story I hear from an offender, even if they're being sentenced for burglary."
Ms Quince says she wrote a cultural report that led to a judge reducing an offender's prison sentence by a third because of her Maori cultural background and deprivation.
The chief district court judge Jan-Marie Doogue has written to the Ministry of Justice asking for a law change so judges can order cultural reports.
