I'm afraid I have to disagree with my learned colleague. I think the judiciary has evolved, and the society has evolved. I think there's a lot more information available. There are a lot more studies, including studies that show the inadequacies of imprisonment, how imprisonment generally is counterproductive. We've got greater insights into the nature of the people who commit crimes.
There are some evil people who should be locked away for a long time so that they're not allowed to continue to prey on society, but there are a lot of other shades of grey in terms of people who come from broken homes, people who have all kinds of psychiatric problems, mental problems, and that sort of thing, and I think sentencing has become a much more sophisticated process because of that knowledge. The idea that anything but jail should come first is a principle of sentencing, and I think a very sound principle, particularly where you talk about a first offender, someone who has not gone to jail before, someone who is a young offender where there's hope for rehabilitation. That principle I think is a very valid one.
There are other principles of sentencing that say that in certain circumstances a person must go to jail, even though there's almost no likelihood of recidivism. A person who is in a position of trust, a lawyer, an accountant, who has trust responsibilities and who abuses those responsibilities, even though it may be as a result of a rough time through addiction or whatever the case may be, such a person has to go to jail. That's a sentencing principle, because in that situation general deterrence must be prevalent.
So I think we've evolved in our understanding of sentencing. There have been studies done showing that when lay people were asked what kind of sentence they would give for a certain set of facts, they've come down very hard as a gut reaction. When they learned the circumstances, the kind of information that would come before a judge on a sentencing hearing, their result changed to come out to just about what the judges had decided in these cases. There are actual criminological studies that demonstrate—