New Zealand’s justice system is quietly dismantling two key sentencing reports that judges rely on most when handling offenders with addiction and complex personal histories. Legal aid funding for Section 27 cultural reports vanished in 2024. Now the Ministry of Justice has stripped family and upbringing information from alcohol and drug court background reports used in sentencing. Legal experts, counsellors, and criminologists say the combined effect will prove costly, in human terms and for the public purse.

Why Sentencing Reports Matter for Justice Outcomes

Judges do not simply apply a formula when sentencing someone. They weigh up a person’s circumstances, their likelihood of reoffending, and whether rehabilitation is a realistic path. Sentencing reports give judges the information they need to make those calls well.

Section 27 cultural and background reports let whānau, community members, or expert writers place an offender’s behaviour within the context of their life history. Alcohol and other drug (AOD) reports, meanwhile, helped judges determine whether addiction drove the offending and what treatment might help. Together, these court background reports formed a critical bridge between a person’s lived experience and the courtroom.

Legal aid funded both types of sentencing reports until recently. Now both face cuts that experts say will leave judges poorly informed.

The Section 27 Decision: Scrapping Sentencing Reports at the Source

In early 2024, Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith announced the government would scrap legal aid for Section 27 reports. He described the system as a “cottage industry” that cost taxpayers NZ$7.5 million for 2,500 reports in a single year. The government argued defendants could still have family or friends speak on their behalf orally in court.

Critics rejected that position immediately. Dr Juan Tauri, a criminologist who writes Section 27 reports, pointed out that privately commissioned sentencing reports would remain available to those with money. Working-class Māori, Pākehā, and Pasifika defendants would simply go without.

“They know full well that many in our communities do not have the social capital to make the impression that is required,” Tauri said. Calling the oral-submission alternative adequate, he added, was “hugely simplistic” and frankly “condescending.”

Former District Court Judge Dr David Harvey backed that view. Court background reports, he said, were “extremely helpful for sentencing judges” because judges could study them before a hearing and reflect carefully. Reading a detailed written report in advance is far more effective than absorbing highly personal information on the spot during proceedings.

“Trying to get this information, process it, evaluate it and incorporate it into the sentencing on the fly is not going to really work very well at all,” he said.

Law Society president Frazer Barton warned the changes would hit Māori hardest, given their overrepresentation in the criminal justice system. He also pushed back on the idea that these sentencing reports were simply a tool for reducing sentences. “This is about equitable, effective, and tailored sentencing outcomes,” he said.

How Court Background Reports on Alcohol and Drug Use Are Now Being Hollowed Out

In March 2026, a further change surfaced. The Ministry of Justice launched a new Approved Alcohol and Other Drug Report Writers Service, complete with a standardised template. The template carried a striking instruction: the report “should not include information on personal, family, whānau, community and cultural background relying on section 27 Sentencing Act 2002.”

Alcohol and drug counsellors who have spent years producing these reports reacted with alarm.

Roger Brooking has written AOD court background reports for 20 years. He told RNZ that nine times out of ten, childhood experience explained how someone ended up with a substance problem. Parents with their own addiction, family mental health crises, early exposure to drugs or alcohol at nine, ten, or twelve years old: judges need that context to sentence meaningfully. According to a 2016 study, more than 50 per cent of crime in New Zealand involved people under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Ninety-one per cent of prisoners carried a lifetime diagnosis of a mental health or substance use disorder, and 62 per cent had received that diagnosis in the past 12 months alone.

Brooking could not see how removing that background from sentencing reports would help anyone. “If you are only putting in information about alcohol and drug use into these reports, they are not going to be of much use at the end of the day,” he said.

“Like Asking a Doctor to Diagnose Without Symptoms”: The Flawed Logic Behind the Cuts

Elizabeth Hall, co-chair of Te Matakahi, the Defence Lawyers Association of New Zealand, was equally critical. Her analogy was blunt and hard to argue with.

“It is like asking a doctor to give a diagnosis, but without explaining what the symptoms are, how the disease has come about in the first place, what has been tried, what probably will work, what probably will not work.”

Hall stressed that AOD court background reports do not only shape the sentencing decision. Probation services and the Department of Corrections receive them too, and they guide rehabilitation efforts well beyond the courtroom. A thinner, stripped-back report does not just affect one hearing. It weakens the entire system that follows.

The financial logic, she said, was equally shortsighted. A cheaper sentencing report leading to an ineffective sentence, which in turn produces reoffending, saves nothing. “There will absolutely be an economic outcome in terms of replication of work down the line,” Hall said.

The Compounding Problem: Section 27 No Longer Fills the Gap

The Ministry of Justice told RNZ that defendants could still raise background information through Section 27 reports or oral submissions. Brooking found that answer deeply inadequate. The government had already cut funding for those very Section 27 reports.

“A very small number of defendants a year might be able to fund a cultural report privately,” he said. Those defendants, he added drily, “would have to have wealthy parents or have stashed away funds from drug dealing that the cops did not find.”

Two overlapping systems that together gave judges a fuller picture of a defendant’s life have both eroded at the same time. What remains is an oral submission process that many defendants find deeply daunting. Dr Harvey put it plainly.

“Imagine what it must be for a layperson who has no experience in this, and who is being asked to talk about highly personal information in front of a judge, a courtroom full of lawyers, a courtroom full of the public,” Harvey said.

Māori defendants, Tauri noted earlier, often carry particularly difficult histories with the court system. Asking them to speak candidly in that setting ignores a painful reality.

The Real Cost of Getting Sentencing Wrong

The government frames both decisions around financial efficiency. Critics are not arguing against fiscal responsibility. Their point is sharper than that: cutting court background reports is not efficient. It is just cheaper in the short term.

Addiction often roots itself in childhood trauma. When judges lack the information to understand that link, sentences become less targeted. Reoffending becomes more likely. Victims multiply. Prosecutions pile up. Prison costs rise. People Against Prisons Aotearoa spokesperson Emmy Rākete put it directly: “There is no fiscal argument for ending cultural report funding. They pay for themselves by reducing state spending on incarceration.”

Substance use disorders do not sort themselves out because the paperwork got shorter. The savings the government claims at the front end may look very different once the downstream costs arrive.

For counsellors, lawyers, and judges working with these cases daily, that reckoning already feels inevitable.

Source: dbrecoveryresources