When Lisa was 12 years old, she was dragged into secure "treatment," followed fairly quickly by secure custody. The system was not impressed by her assertive and confident manner. Unlike so many other young women her age, she was clearly a respected and undisputed leader. These qualities are not ones that are generally accepted, much less encouraged or nurtured, in our social control systems – be they child welfare or criminal justice in orientation. They are seen as particularly unacceptable when embodied by a young woman. Sexism, racism, heterosexism, and class biases intersect to provide an incredibly discriminatory lens through which women like Lisa are viewed and judged. As a result, it did not take long for the adults in authority to label Lisa as a "problem" in need of "correction."

Once the labels were applied, they not only stuck, but they also attracted other labels that built upon and expanded those prior. Consequently, Lisa started out as "mischievous" and "a brat," only to be labelled later as an instigator, negative, and eventually, aggressive, sociopathic and then a dangerous offender. Largely based upon accounts of her institutional behaviour in young offender centres, as well as her "unfeminine" renegade behaviour while working the street, Lisa was characterized as the most dangerous woman in Canada by Justice Murray in 1994 and then as a maximum security prisoner by the Correctional Service of Canada for more than four years.

Including her pre-trial detention, Lisa spent approximately six years in jail for an offence which the Court of Appeal eventually determined warranted a three year sentence, as opposed to the indeterminate one imposed by Justice Murray. To make matters worse, she also spent most of her time living in some of the most severe and limiting prison conditions in Canada. As a result of the appeal, Lisa went from facing the rest of her life in prison one day, to receiving the decision and exiting jail within two days of the issuance of the court's decision.

As the Court of Appeal of Alberta judges pointed out at page 47 of their decision, "predicting future behaviour based on past conduct is an inexact science. It is precisely because this finding must rest at least in part on predictions of human behaviour – and often conflicting ones at that – that ... the difficulties and dangers inherent in a determination of future danger have been well recognized for years." In quoting the Law Reform Commission of Canada, from page 19 of The Criminal Process and Mental Disorder, Working Paper 14, the Court of Appeal noted that, "...in the last few years legal and medical journals have been inundated with reports of studies considering various aspects of the reliability and predictive accuracy of psychiatric assessments of dangerousness. More remarkable than the bulk of this literature is its unanimity – it concludes that clinical predictions of dangerousness are at best suspect, and at worst, totally unreliable".

Furthermore, the Court of Appeal identified (at page 49) several considerations which they judged should be considered in evaluating the relative weight to be applied to psychiatric evidence and assessments; namely: