Lori Loughlin sentenced to two months in prison, and her husband sentenced to five months:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lori-loughlin-college-admissions-scandal-two-months-prison-sentence-giannulli-mossimo-5-months/
Yeah, but I don't really care much about this case. There are worse criminals out there.
shareNothing screams hypocrisy like a few people being made scapegoats for a commonly committed misdemeanour.
> Nothing screams hypocrisy like a few people being made scapegoats for a commonly committed misdemeanour.
It wasn't a misdemeanor. She's now a convicted felon. And they spent a half million dollars on their scheme. That's hardly a commonly committed crime.
Spent their own money to get their kid into a private school. How this is a federal crime is beyond me. Yet she probably is getting more jail time than Clinesmith, the FBI lawyer who falsified information to obtain a FISA warrant. Her husband almost certainly got more jail time than Clinesmith will get. Ridiculous.
shareIt matters because the couple bribed the coach and the administrator to use an athletic scholarship meant for a qualified student. They don't just make an extra space for a legacy or rich kid; they reject someone who worked for their grades. And the two schemers pocketed the money. It didn't get dispersed for salaries or new programs. Everyone involved defrauded the school and other students. They should have their wages garnished to set up a college fund for low-income students.
> It matters because the couple bribed the coach and the administrator to use an athletic scholarship meant for a qualified student. They don't just make an extra space for a legacy or rich kid; they reject someone who worked for their grades. [emphasis mine]
I was in academia for a while. Taught college students and all that. People are admitted to colleges for all sorts of screwy reasons which have nothing to do with their academic potential. Sometimes that's good, sometimes it's bad. I've seen applicants "lifted" by hundreds of SAT points for reasons that are frankly stupid. So it's not as if academia is so pure and holy. That's one of the reasons I left.
Sometimes, quite often in fact, an extra spot is made for a truly exceptional kid. It's not certain that someone was rejected to make room for Loughlin's daughter. But I think it's likely that you're correct. They didn't present their kid as an exceptional case, they just presented her as better qualified than she really was. Somewhere out there, there's a kid who wanted to get into USC and deserved to but didn't because Loughlin and her husband bought that spot for $500,000 and committed fraud along the way.
> Spent their own money to get their kid into a private school. How this is a federal crime is beyond me.
Using their money to advance their child's chances of admission isn't the crime. Had they simply donated that $500K to USC, that probably would have got the kid in. The crime here is fraud.
And I agree, there's only a rough correlation between the law and actual justice. Well, that's how the real world works, I guess.
It's not justice. It's just bad luck.
share> It's not justice. It's just bad luck.
No, it's not bad luck. The evidence shows they knew what they were doing was wrong. They acknowledged it in emails with their co-conspirators. They concealed it with deceptive financial transactions. They attempted to intimidate a guidance counselor who tried to blow the whistle on them. And had they come clean at the start like Felicity Huffman did, they would have gotten sentences of mere days. Of course, it was their right to fight the charges. But if you're guilty of a crime and you fight the charges, the longer you do so the worse the sentence if you're convicted. Everyone knows that. Their lawyers certainly would have advised them of this. They knew what they were doing, at every step, and they got what they deserved.
Yes they were obviously in the wrong, and it is good that they were punished accordingly. But it's naive to think that they were alone doing these kind of thing. It's just that they got caught while nobody cares about everyone else doing the same thing.
shareMeanwhile no one riots over child-sex-slavery.
shareI have the capacity to be outraged over child trafficking, and also white collar crime.
No one rioted over this either.
True but it's getting 500% more attention and people care about white collar crime and things like OP far more.
The priority of outrage seems askew.
I don't think that it's just that the outrage is askew. I think that it's led askew a bit for sure, but I don't know who exactly to blame for that.
I think that it's just a really complicated issue that doesn't have an easy solution. Human trafficking involves many countries with many different laws, so even with international cooperation, it's not like we know who is blame. You cut off one head, and how many more grow back? We can protest all we want, but it's not going to make it stop.
I think our sources of information are less likely to report stuff like sex trafficking despite its historic and ubiquitous presence because it soils the idea of sex which is something so successfully used to sell everything. The difficulty of dealing with the problem does not make it less horrible and present. Things CAN be done. If the problem was covered more, it might get the proportionate outrage it deserves. I don't recall any actors standing before congress to talk about child sex trafficking. Has one?
It is likely that since no political party can be linked to it, it doesn't get traction (or maybe because BOTH secretly can be).
I more apt to think the second, and I'm not trying to dismiss the problem. One of the parts of my education was to look for kids who could be targeted, and to know how they are targeted, how to try to help, etc. There are ways to help in our own countries to help with those who may be victims, but a lot of people are really against helping those without.
It's sad, but those who are usually victims, are those that don't see any other options. Of course they are lied to, but they still put themselves in these positions because they don't see an other choice. Socio-economic root cause of trafficking such as unemployment, poverty, lack of access to medical services and education are major factors for trafficking.
Like I said, it's a very complicated issue that runs up the ladder. There needs to be changes made to the laws. For instance, trafficked women and men are usually seen as breaking prostitution or migration laws rather than as victims of trafficking, which makes them unwilling to testify against traffickers. In 2008 the former president of Cambodia avoided prosecution after receiving $30,000 in order to release a brothel owner imprisoned for trafficking. He certainly isn't the only politician in the world to have done that.
So, again, I think that it's a complicated issue, that is hard to place consistently on the evening news.
I see your point.
The only place I see it addressed at all is on fictional tv shows as a typical throw away problem some cops deal with on the side or that leads to the REAL problem.
Every time I see hot topic, celeb pet-projects or the political-crowbar of the week, I wonder wtf is wrong with people's ethical priorities. What you wrote cools my head a little.
me too lazy to read
guessing its minimum security stuff
maybe even house arrest ala martha stewart
https://youtu.be/htCJTPu8GPE
BTW - Martha Stewart ernt to prison, prison. No house arrest,