Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to all the witnesses for coming to join us this morning.
Professor Bala, I read your entire brief and I welcome your insightful comments on some of the issues. In particular, you've supported certain of the changes and recommendations and also proposed others. I suppose you did touch on deterrence as a problem in the sense of using individual deterrence as a principle of sentencing, and I think denunciation is related to that.
I was struck by one of your comments here, which was that, “studies show that the principle of 'deterrence' affects judges, but not youth”. That seems to me to be capturing a criticism of using deterrence as a method to deal with youth crime. Would you explain what you mean by that and how that affects this legislation and your recommendations?