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Comment by baggy_trough | Hacker News Reader

2 years in jail for this is absurd. A week would be more than enough.

Please familiarize yourself with minimum sentencing guidelines for drug possession. These parents, by preventing other students from being able to get an education they earned, are causing far more harm.

Perhaps those sentences are equally or more absurd?

I absolutely agree and personally feel that incarceration as vengeance is immoral and incarceration only becomes a moral action when it is a deterrent to future actions. If you were omnipresent and knew that a murderer would never murder again - and that the jailing of that murderer would not prevent any future murders - then I'd consider it to be immoral to jail them.

Unfortunately a lot of America is on the vengeance path when it comes to punishments for crimes. We need a lot more criminal justice reform but, please, let's not start by giving the elites a pass - justice is already inequal enough.

So you get one free murder? No, the deterrent had to be there beforehand, so that our hypothetical killer who is certain she only wants to kill one person will be exposed to that deterrence. Even if she is not thereby deterred, the fact that the punishment is applied to her will have a deterrent effect on others contemplating a similar crime. Therefore the punishment has value even if there is no need to prevent the murderer from killing again. (Edit: you did point out that the omniscience allows you to know that there will actually be no deterrent effect but that's asking a lot :)

I included omniscience specifically for that reason, I agree that murders must be punished because otherwise people will see fewer downsides to committing murders themselves.

Can I push this to the concept of Botany Bay the far away prison colony - if murder results in the murderer being shipped off and everyone in society understands how terrible it is there... do you actually need to send people there? Wouldn't the effect on society be the same if you just shipped them somewhere nice and (again lots of omnipotence and omnipresence here) could ensure no one ever learned of your deception?

I'm mostly pushing this out in an effort to clarify what we as a society get out of punishment (in my opinion) we are seeking to reduce these sorts of actions we consider to be bad for society, any punishment that exists solely to inflict pain on someone (even if they're really bad) without any associated benefits to deterrence or a decrease in recidivism ... it's pointless and cruel (again, in my eyes).

And yes, I like philosophy, so this scenario is super removed from the real world.

It is absurd. There is a black woman who was sentenced to 5 years in jail for falsifying her location so her children could go to a better school district. Yet this outright fraud only sees a 2 year sentence by comparison.

A week?! If I was interested in this kind of scheme, a week wouldn't deter me at all.

If I were interested in this kind of scheme, I'd be in it for my own ego - my image of myself would be better if my kids went to a big name college, and other peoples' image of me would also be better. Well, my image of myself (and others' image of me) would take a hit from even a week in jail.

Mind you, I'm not saying a week is the right answer. Just saying that, to those kind of people, it's embarrassing, and that's a deterrent.

What is your reasoning for such a small penalty?

Generally a person who is caught and convicted of crime X is penalized enough to dissuade others of that crime. Which means that the severity of the penalty times the odds of being caught has to be proportional to the value of committing the crime. Since the parents were willing to spend tens of thousands, and their odds of being caught were low, the appropriate penalty should be stiff if it is to have the right effect.

Now is it disproportionate to other crimes? No. Most states have laws about the theft of large amounts of property. With per state thresholds starting in the $1-$5k range, you can get a prison sentence for grand larceny of 1-10 years.

So treat this as stealing from some other applicant the right to go to the university of their choice. I can come to this being a value stolen of tens of thousands in multiple ways. Starting with the fact that the thieves were willing to spend tens of thousands, and continuing with an estimate of the impact on that unlucky loser's future income. That makes it grand larceny, and a 2 year jail sentence is perfectly in line with crimes of a similar magnitude.

While I am generally against how much the US puts people in jail, I applaud the fact that this case treats white collar crime with similar seriousness to blue collar crime.

aw, poor little elites

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