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, t

Justice committee  If they have legal advice.

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  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  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  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

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

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

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 respo

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 n

Justice committee  Our view is that the way prisons are currently used exacerbates the very conditions that led to most of those women being criminalized. So we would like to see alternatives to the way we currently imprison. So those who are dangerous and need to be separated need to have differen

Justice committee  As all the heads of corrections determined in the mid-nineties, 75% of those who are currently serving sentences could probably be in the community, being held accountable, and contributing in other ways. Then we would be able to focus on those who are truly causing grief in the