Amid the uproar over actress Felicity Huffman’s prison sentence of just 14 days for her participation in the infamous college admissions scandal, singer John Legend says that proper justice may have been done.
“I get why everyone gets mad when rich person X gets a short sentence and poor person of color Y gets a long one,” Legend tweeted Saturday, according to Fox News. “The answer isn’t for X to get more; it’s for both of them to get less (or even none!!!) We should level down not up.”
“Americans have become desensitized to how much we lock people up,” Legend continued. “Prisons and jails are not the answer to every bad thing everyone does, but we’ve come to use them to address nearly every societal ill.”
Legend then referenced the case of Kelly Williams-Bolar, who received a five-year sentence in 2011 (later suspended to just 10 days) for using a relative’s home address in order to enroll her child into a better public school.
“It’s insane we locked a woman up for 5 years for sending her kid to the wrong school district. Literally everyone involved in that decision should be ashamed of themselves,” said Legend. “It’s unconscionable that we locked a woman up for voting when, unbeknownst to her, she was ineligible. Her sentence shouldn’t be fewer years. It should be ZERO. And no one in our nation will benefit from the 14 days an actress will serve for cheating in college admissions. We don’t need to lock people up for any of this stuff.” – READ MORE