https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/12/chicago-woman-stolen-chicken-wings-sentencing
Routine audit found school food service director took more than 11,000 cases of wings intended for remote learners
Great, now go after the buyers.
Some local fast food franchise owner knew enough to not ask questions about discount meat being sold from a school district van.
Literally hundreds of tons of chicken wings. Imagine 10 trucks full.
I don’t think she ate them all.
What would you do with 1.5 million in chicken besides eating a little and selling the rest.
You could literally eat like a millionaire for a while so long as you have a few deep freezers.
Realistically, she filled her freezer and sold a ton of them for 25¢ on the dollar to other people who filled their freezer and sold them off for 50¢ on the dollar.
I wouldn't know, but somehow I doubt millionaires eat $1.5 million worth of school cafeteria grade chicken.
And without digging into it, I bet it's far more than a few deep freezers worth.
The joke is she had a net worth of over $1.5m due to the value of the chicken, so eating anything would be eating like a millionaire.
A chicken wing is a chicken wing and it don't matter if you got $5 or $5 million. I know for a fact that I would still eat Totino's pizza(pizza that is like $1.50 per.) if I were a billionaire
That is a FUCK TON of chicken wings.
Alexa tells me the wholesale price of chicken wings is $3.22 a pound and each pound is around 5 wings.
So $1.5m / $3.22 = 465,838.5 pounds of wings.
2,329,193 wings.
What did they charge her with? "Possession with intent to distribute"? LOL.
I have to assume they’re calculating the menu price of those wings. Then it's only ~2k lbs
when the wings were meant for children doing remote learning but who were still picking up school meals
Think for a moment about the kids who don't eat a school meal because it's convenient but because they have to, for one reason or another. Now imagine stealing from their budget.
Harvey is a very economically depressed area. There’s a good chance that if the school didn’t feed the kids during Covid, the kids would have gone hungry.
It was the second paragraph.
Vera Liddell, the food service director for Harvey School District 152 near Chicago, stole the huge amount of fast food during the pandemic and its aftermath, when the wings were meant for children doing remote learning but who were still picking up school meals, local TV station WGN reported.
What I want to know is what the hell did she do with that many chicken wings? She can't have sold them... She took them on a case-by-case basis.
Not that weird. Grab the wings with public money, sell them to some fast food chain with low standards and win a lot of money. Oh! And "fuck poor kids!".
Probably independently owned and operated, non-franchised restaurants. Fast food franchisees generally aren't around the day to day operations and are contractually obligated to buy supplies from the franchise. But it's not impossible that one is dumb enough or desperate enough to do something like that.
What a despicable crime. She stole them from needy school kids; they were intended to feed kids in low-income areas during lockdown.
Seems a bit harsh tbh
Edit: I'm copying in a response from further down the thread to hopefully centralize things rather than having multiple similar responses in multiple multiple places
It isn't about the severity of the crime.
Non violent crime being punished by jail time does nothing useful. It doesn't for drug crimes, for prostitution, for theft, for anything.
I'm kinda amazed that lemmy of all places is so against the idea of criminal justice reform.
Either the system does something useful, or it needs changing. If jail time has a point other than fucking up the life of the criminal, I sure as hell can't see it for non violent crime. Even for some violent crime, chances are that the criminal would have a better chance of being reformed by other methods than plain segregation from society, but at least that can claim to be a benefit by virtue of preventing the criminal from being violent at large.
IDGAF about who someone steals from, what they stole, or why. I care about making the best effort to A: reduce the chances of it happening again, and B: having the thief making restitution in one way or another. Jail achieves neither of those.
I don't know, she stole food meant for low income kids. That's appallingly immoral in my book. For a lot of kids, the meals they get at (or in this case from) school are the only meals they may get, and I'm positive the pandemic didn't improve that situation for a lot of people.
Eh, I'm not the sort to care about what gets stolen, it's about any criminal prosecution amd sentencing making sense. Shoving a thief in jail is just punishment theater that doesn't help fix what they messed up.
Put their ass to work doing community service helping the program for a decade. Jail just wastes resources.
I mean, I think we should care about what's stolen - if someone steals a pack of wings from Walmart, no one's going hungry over it (and if she managed to steal 11,000 cases from them, I'd be more impressed than anything). But her whole job is to make sure kids are fed and she knew she was taking food directly out of their mouths. That's far worse to me.
It isn't about the severity of the crime.
Non violent crime being punished by jail time does nothing useful. It doesn't for drug crimes, for prostitution, for theft, for anything.
I'm kinda amazed that lemmy of all places is so against the idea of criminal justice reform.
Either the system does something useful, or it needs changing. If jail time has a point other than fucking up the life of the criminal, I sure as hell can't see it for non violent crime. Even for some violent crime, chances are that the criminal would have a better chance of being reformed by other methods than plain segregation from society, but at least that can claim to be a benefit by virtue of preventing the criminal from being violent at large.
IDGAF about who someone steals from, what they stole, or why. I care about making the best effort to A: reduce the chances of it happening again, and B: having the thief making restitution in one way or another. Jail achieves neither of those.
This was organized crime by a corrupt school official. This isn't petty crime. So I don't think this situation is one of those that "does nothing useful" to have severe consequences. Additionally, your dismissal of the circumstances around the crime seems odd. This person stole from the most vulnerable where restitution isn't possible because we don't have time machines and they stole an amount that restitution is beyond the means of the thief without further commiting theft or fraud.
Jail is the best option here. I think the sentencing could be lighter and the parole and probation system should be fixed, but there's not much better to be done in a scenario like this.
Also I think making kids starve constitues violence.
Literally causing the starvation of hungry children used to be punished by mob beating to death. I think she is getting of quite lightly, and will probably make a profit when she gets out in like two years and does a right wing media circus tour.
The mistakes of the past being used as an excuse to keep making lesser mistakes is pretty damn lame.
Does the sentence do anything other than make people feel better because it's punishment?
I think it’s also important for you to understand the context that a non-violent woman is unlikely to serve more than a third of her initial sentence which is where these numbers come from.
That's a good thing, not a bad one. But my objection still stands. It's a harsh sentence for a non violent crime. Which, if harsh sentences did any good, I wouldn't object. But they don't.
How would you handle someone that intentionally starved thousands of children? It’s not like this was some broke starving person stealing a tampon, they had a stable, well paying executive job and made an intentional choice.
Hyperbole isn't useful either.
This was not literal starvation. Shitty, underhanded, and illegal, but not starvation. If you're going to insist on exaggerating the issue, please don't bother me.
I'll say it again, it doesn't matter what the non violent crime is, you make the justice about fixing what they did. I'm not sure where in the thread I said it, but I suggested a decade of community service working in the very program stolen from, under heavy supervision.