You seem to divide the world starkly into black and white. A fallacy that is common to people who think this way is the either-or, or False Dilemma (http://en.w

You seem to divide the world starkly into black and white. A fallacy that is common to people who think this way is the either-or, or False Dilemma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma) fallacy. Despite your first sentence, where you try to introduce some nuance to your argument, your other statements suggest that you don't have any room in your schema for people who commit damaging, non-violent crimes but express remorse for them. Essentially remorse is less important (if at all) to you than the fact that someone, somewhere was damaged in some way. Many people here have expressed the opinion that yes, this kid f-ed up real bad and damaged/destroyed Valve's reputation significantly. But no, there isn't a need to lock him up, because it wouldn't serve a purpose. If the purpose of the lockup is only to punish him (for punishment's sake), which you seem to be intent upon, then yeah it makes sense to give him 10-20 years despite a marked shift in his personality and outlook on life. To me, it seems like a horrible waste of money and of everyone's time to punish him so severely given that he's already had a change of heart, has the beginning of a successful career doing legitimate work, and he didn't commit any violence. Also, we have the benefit of hindsight here: Valve went on to be an even bigger success after this, as HL2 + Steam is practically a money printing machine for them.