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Man Gets 10 Years For VoIP Hacking
angry tapir writes "A US court has sentenced a Venezuelan man to 10 years in prison for stealing and then reselling more than 10 million minutes of Internet phone service. Edwin Pena, 27, was convicted in February of masterminding a scheme to hack into more than 15 telecommunications companies and then reroute calls to their networks at no charge. He must also pay more than US$1 million in restitution, and will be deported once his sentence is served."
Spend money 'punishing' him and then immediately deport him. Rehabilitation seems to have no meaning there.
Well jail time is theoretically about rehabilitation, but in practice it's about deterrence. It wouldn't deter anyone from following in his footsteps if he was sent home without serving jail time (I think the $1m repayment part is just wishful thinking). Mind you, how do you rehabilitate someone whose crime is purely financial in a society that's largely focused on the pursuit of money, or prevent others copying him? In that case his "crime" was merely being caught, and every criminal assumes he's smarter than the last guy and won't get caught, so the effectiveness of such a sentence even as a deterent is doubtful.