Justice committee  Yes, I have no reason to dispute that. I suspect you'll see the numbers going up now there is assistance to get there. I think that some of the reality was people couldn't afford to go before, so we've seen the increase since those provisions.

Justice committee  Again, this is just my opinion, and certainly lots of people have different opinions. But those who work in the area of trauma and recovery talk about the importance of early intervention, as early as possible, to provide support for individuals who are going through the grief, the loss, the anger—they understand all those emotions—to try to assist them to get to a place where they can, at the very least, move on with their lives.

Justice committee  They have access to a lawyer, but I'll give you—

Justice committee  Sometimes they have access to a lawyer, but not necessarily access at the times when they're making those decisions. So for instance we have, just talking about—

Justice committee  Yes. You'll find—and I'm sure you know this if you've looked at this—that a lot of times people will make statements long before they see a lawyer, or they won't even know how to get access to a lawyer. And that's increasingly the case, as it's more difficult to access legal aid.

Justice committee  If they have legal advice.

Justice committee  In terms of accessing, we know that many of the women we work with will initially provide the information to the police in the first place. They'll often even self-report. They'll want to plead guilty, they may plead guilty—

Justice committee  Sure. Well, we have a number of situations, particularly since the policy of mandatory charging and countercharging started to happen in violence-against-women situations, where usually it's the woman calling in to a 911 operator, for instance, reporting the situation, sometimes even reporting that she herself has hit him or thrown something at him to try to ward him off.

Justice committee  I teach a whole course on that at law school. We use some of the cases I've worked on and some that I haven't that are still unfolding. When you have someone with an intellectual disability who asks someone to please stop her being beaten up regularly and the guy says to give him $100 and he'll do it and he does it and she is convicted of first-degree murder, I do think that's a problem.

Justice committee  In my experience of working in and around the system with young people, men and women, for the last 27 years, I would agree with that. It's part of why women are the fastest-growing prison population yet not perceived as the greatest risk to public safety. Women who are poor, who are doing things for which they can be criminalized to put food on the table, to pay the rent, are in prison.

Justice committee  I think it's increasingly not correct. If you look at the number of women who are imprisoned, many of them have pled guilty to the charges for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes they believe that they won't have a fair process. They often take responsibility that exceeds their responsibility.

Justice committee  Some maybe.

Justice committee  It would depend. There was a time when I knew every single woman in the federal prison system because I went every month to the Prison for Women.

Justice committee  To the jury, yes.

Justice committee  I think some people would think that way, but I think the challenge often is, particularly for people serving life sentences, that they are not even allowed to participate in programs until their eligibility dates. Quite frankly, my fear would be that it could be another excuse not to provide those programs at earlier dates.