I agree in principle. But I think there has to be a difference in punishment between unrepentant perpetrators who get caught, and perpetrators who come forward on their own volition. If I remember the original Reader's Digest article, this person was already held to account many years ago -- he lost all his credentials, qualifications and not to mention respect and credibility. Even the original story was published much later. If we continue to pounce on people like this many years after the fact, we're only discouraging others with a guilty conscience to come forward.
Yeah, this is kind of a Frank Abagnale type story. He did some incredible yet dishonest and criminal things, but redeemed himself later in life. I’m sure this guy bullied a lot of people to get them to help him cheat. He spent 40 years pretty much as an asshole—he had stolen a life that he hadn’t earned, and had deprived his students of a qualified educator.
Maybe the moral of the story is that people can change and become positive contributors to society. Think of all the people who have been locked up for decades for crimes they committed as teenagers. They were just thrown away by society without a chance for redemption. This is part of what Black Lives Matter means to me—there’s a primitive impulse in people’s brains to say they’re criminals and they won’t amount to anything and just cause harm. This guy got a chance that was denied to millions of black youths.
Speaking of... there seems to be a good chance that Frank Abagnale lied about lying and his biggest con has been making a career out of convincing people of his non-existent previous cons (which in retrospect isn't all that surprising I suppose, there's no a priori reason to believe that an ex-conman has been honest about his ex-cons).
It seems that he had only one big true con: where he conned a woman's family into taking care of him and stealing money from them while he essentially stalked her, was found out and then sent to prison.
