In line with the election promises of two of its constituent parties, the government has announced it will cut all funding for so-called cultural reports for people facing sentencing in the courts. The reports, whose average cost is about $3000, have been provided for in Section 27 of the Sentencing Act since 2002, but have become more common in recent years. They have also become a political football.
In part, that’s because the public’s view of cultural reports is informed by news stories that invariably focus on any discount granted by a sentencing judge. The judge is typically the only independent party who sees the full report and knows the whole story. Some judges clearly appreciate it as a sentencing tool; a handful have been vocal in declaring they don’t need it.
I know a little about the reports because I’ve worked on a couple of dozen of them, as one of a number of experienced journalists who write cultural reports for the same company.
The work isn’t journalism, but the journalistic skills of getting people to tell their stories then writing those stories clearly and neutrally are certainly helpful. For a few writers it’s the mainstay of their income, but I could never manage that. The money is modest and the burden of carrying someone’s trauma around in your head until the job is finished can be heavy. I really started doing it because I wanted to know more.
We work to a structured set of questions and one of the challenges is often establishing a chronology. These men (they’re almost all men and mostly Māori) are often past their most chaotic criminal years and don’t have an orderly memory of those years. Where possible, we also talk to family members to verify their accounts. Sometimes, there’s no one to talk to.
It doesn’t take long to discern patterns. Childhood trauma – neglect, witnessing and suffering violence, sometimes sexual abuse – is a constant. Unaddressed (as it usually is), that trauma seems to leave people without resources when, say, methamphetamine comes along. Gang life is a frequent feature. One man I talked to told me about growing up in a gang house where he was forced to fight other children or be beaten or denied food. More often, the gang is simply a family backdrop and the only place to go when everything breaks.
Neurodiversity is not uncommon. When a young man described his violent incidents to me, I realised they sounded a lot like autistic meltdowns. He came from a family far too broken for that to be picked up, and it isn’t my role to diagnose, but I was able to flag it to the more qualified people who work on the reports after me.
ADHD is sometimes diagnosed in primary school, usually forgotten thereafter. One guy in his 40s had impulsively gone off his meds at age 15 and been repeatedly refused a prescription since as a “drug-seeker”.
A crucial part of the reports for sentencing judges is getting some idea of any family and community support that might aid rehabilitation. And of therapeutic gaps: It’s very common for these men to have never had any help to deal with the most awful experiences or with ongoing addictions. They generally hate what they’ve become and they talk a lot about not wanting their children to follow them.
I’ve often felt I know a lot more about the world through doing this work – about where problems begin and what lives and families actually look like. The private nature of the reports means they don’t reach the wider public – even academic research would be difficult – but I can’t help but feel things would be different if everyone heard these stories. Soon, no one will.
A commitment to knowing less is rarely a good thing.
