August 17, 2023
Cultural reports put human face on crime
An expert on race and the law is warning that ACT’s promise to scrap cultural reports will lead to people being wrongly sent to prison.
University of Auckland senior law lecturer Dylan Asafo says the reports started as a way for whanau and community members to speak to the sentencing judge.
They have evolved into highly professional productions, where report writers interview the offender and their whanau to provide context about who they are, where they come from and what may have contributed to the offending.
“So they are absolutely essential, Without these reports judges would be sentencing people to prison without actually knowing who they are and their story and where they come from, so there is a real danger without them judges won’t be sentencing human beings – they will be sentencing numbers and statistics,” Mr Afaso says.
He says the push to abolish cultural reports taps into a racist narrative that Maori are getting special treatment in courts, which simply isn’t true.