One of the most disheartening things I've seen—and I think every criminal defence lawyer has seen—is individuals who are pleading guilty not because they're guilty or remorseful but because they will do anything to get out of jail. I think I would, given what I know about those conditions.
It's that sort of perverse incentive, which has been well studied in the context of minimum sentences, that is most concerning, because now you not only have individuals who have lost confidence in the justice system because of how they were treated, what they were forced to do and the conditions they were in, but individuals who, unfortunately, we disproportionally see as racialized and marginalized, and who now have criminal records, which makes it all the more difficult to get a job, to reintegrate into society, to volunteer and to be the prosocial individuals we and they want them to be.
It's this cyclical and self-fulfilling prophecy that really needs to be stopped. We need to do that through funding things like treatment, through bail supervision and through insisting that our municipal and other police forces allocate resources like that responsibly, so that if there is a bail breach and someone doesn't show up to court, we're alerted before there's a tragedy.