Photo Credit: Felicity Huffman/Instagram
Felicity Huffman was sentenced to 14 days in prison for her role in the nationwide college cheating scandal and just made news for having her 14 day sentence reduced to 13. Then she had her husband and daughter come visit her as if she was somehow at her wits end. And since then we’ve been waiting for her to be released because there’s not much else to happen regarding her time behind bars unless she loses her grip on the soap. But Lord and behold, reports of her getting out now in only 11 days came in and it’s leaving a lot of us thinking, is there any hope for justice for the wealthy in this country. For awhile, Huffman was the likable one between her and Lori Loughlin. She fessed up early, got her sentence and did what we thought the respectable thing would be, to serve the entire time. After all, it was only 2 weeks. They had sunbathing there. What’s the problem? Now her skipping out on her 14 day prison sentence early now is undoubtedly going to have the public hate her about as much as Loughlin.
So why exactly is Huffman being released? It’s a Bureau of Prisons policy that “falls on a Saturday, Sunday, or legal holiday, on the last preceding weekday unless it is necessary to detain the inmate for another jurisdiction seeking custody under a detainer, or for any other reason which might indicate that the inmate should not be released until the inmate’s scheduled release date.” You all can’t see it but I’m side eye squinting heavily. In fact, when I was made aware of the news, I said “nope,” and chose to cook breakfast before writing about it. I seriously wonder how many people get the ability to be released from prison a day early because the weekend is around the corner. Well she still has a $30,000 court fine to pay, 250 hours of community service, and one year supervised release to look forward to. Her best bet is to remain out of the spotlight for that entire year. She doesn’t need to do anything but do her community service and write letters to Lori Loughlin who hopefully will be serving her first of many years behind bars.
One argument we heard about this case is that people who are against mass incarceration shouldn’t be wishing extensive sentences on people like Huffman and Loughlin. I believe it was Marc Lamont Hill who made that argument. I considered it for about 2.5 seconds when I realized the difference is that those generally discussed when the topic of mass incarceration comes up are those who were over sentenced in selling drugs which was done to make money in areas where they couldn’t otherwise or other petulant crimes like carrying marijuana. Under no circumstances are these women in the same situation. There is nothing disadvantaged about these women and the only down side would be their children not getting in the school they wanted so they had to spend as much as $500,000+ to get them into college. As a worst case scenario, Loughlin’s daughter could have had a house paid for in full including years of utilities for the half million spent to get her into college. This was an unnecessary and deliberate crime. They both deserve the book thrown at them. Now that Huffman is out, we’ll be following Loughlin’s case and equally side eyeing to see what type of sentence she gets.
