Privilege vs. punishment?

NORWALK — The story of a Bridgeport woman who was sent to prison for sending her son to school in Norwalk has sparked outrage after what some have called the lenient sentencing of actress Felicity Huffman for her role in the nationwide college admissions scandal.

Huffman, a “Desperate Housewives” star, was sentenced Friday to 14 days in prison, a $30,000 fine, 250 hours of community service and a year's probation after she pleaded guilty to paying an admissions consultant $15,000 to have a proctor correct her daughter's SAT exam answers in 2017.

But some online have pointed out that Huffman’s punishment is in stark contrast to that of Tanya McDowell, who enrolled her son in Norwalk schools, despite living in Bridgeport. McDowell was sentenced to five years in prison in 2012 on unrelated drug charges and a larceny charge connected to the school case.

Bernie Sanders, Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. senator from Vermont, retweeted a thread comparing Huffman and McDowell’s punishments.

“We have a criminal justice system which is racist, broken, and must be fundamentally reformed,” he tweeted.

Huffman is white, while McDowell is black, and, in their sentencing, the “racism is real and clear to see,” writes D. Watkins in an opinion piece for Salon.

“Both McDowell and Huffman attempted to use the tools they had at their disposal in order to secure better educational opportunities for their respective children,” Watkins wrote. “And yet when examining the disparity in how those crimes are punished, it becomes clear that while on paper they are similar, in the eyes of the court they are apparently deserving of very different punishments.”

Singer John Legend weighed in, too, although he did not refer to McDowell by name.

“It's insane we locked a woman up for 5 years for sending her kid to the wrong school district,” he tweeted. “Literally everyone involved in that decision should be ashamed of themselves.”

But Legend said neither Hoffman nor McDowell should have to go to prison.

“And no one in our nation will benefit from the 14 days an actress will serve for cheating in college admissions,” he tweeted. “We don't need to lock people up for any of this stuff.”

McDowell has said she was homeless and splitting her time between the Norwalk homeless shelter and a friend’s Bridgeport apartment when she enrolled her son, Andrew, at Brookside Elementary School in Norwalk. She used her babysitter’s Bridgeport address to enroll the then 5yearold into kindergarten.

“Never once was I aware of this criteria or policy in regards to you sending your child to the wrong school system,” McDowell told Hearst Connecticut Media in 2017.

McDowell’s arrest in the school case sparked discussion about the racial, social and class disparities in the country—a conversation she has said she is proud to have started.

“I’m not only doing it for Andrew,” she said in 2017. “I’m doing it for any other parent, any other child out there that has the potential to exceed and excel at a certain level and is just being deprived, period.”

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