Of Course the Ex-Stanford Sailing Coach Was Sentenced to One Day in Prison
The college admissions scandal highlights the racial disparities in sentencing for white-collar fraud
In the first sentencing related to the massive college admissions scandal that broke in March, former Stanford sailing coach John Vandemoer, accused of taking $610,000 in bribes to set up three prospective students as ostensible sailing recruits, was ordered to serve a single day in prison, along with a hefty fine and two years of supervised release. (The technical ruling in the case was “time served,” meaning he’ll spend zero time behind bars.) The sentence was surprising, but not totally unexpected: Federal guidelines called for between three and four years in prison, but prosecutors recommended just 13 months. The prosecutors’ reasoning: Vandemoer “has otherwise led a law-abiding life, did not directly profit financially from his crimes, promptly accepted responsibility for them, appears genuinely remorseful, and is unlikely to re-offend.” The judge apparently heard their rationale and opted to do Vandemoer one better.
Vandemoer’s sentence is a stark contrast to others who faced similar charges. In 2011, Kelley Williams-Bolar was convicted of falsifying her residency records in order to send her kids to another school district and sentenced to 10 days in county jail and put on three years of probation. That same year, Tanya McDowell was sentenced to five years in prison for first-degree larceny after enrolling her son in a school outside her district. In the years that followed, parents in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Missouri were all arrested and put on trial for enrolling their children in better public schools outside of their districts, resulting in jail time and felony convictions.
The differences in these instances clear: Vandemoer is a middle-class white guy, the value of whose crime surely exceeds the theft of services perpetrated by this handful of African American and Hispanic families. And that contrast is sadly unsurprising in a country where African Americans make up 12.1% of the general population but 37% of the federal prison population. Indeed, University of Michigan Law School research published in January indicates that while white offenders commit property…
