It's less about sympathy than about how you structure a justice system if you don't want more crime in the future. A lot of things about our justice system work very much counter to how you'd do things if your main goal was to have less crime. See also: banning certain kinds of government college aid for people with drug-related convictions. If you care about recidivism and cycles of poverty & crime why would you make it harder for people who've done their time and gotten out to contribute positively to society?

From a sheer fairness and what is justice actually POV, it's bullshit that this is yet another thing a rich family can shrug off, while a poor family is screwed. I don't have a solution for it, but the role money plays in our justice system may well be the biggest problem with it, which is saying something.

> Hopefully the son learns from that and he should be working to help repay that debt.

Very unlikely, with a record. A decade later and he's doing OK, for values of OK that include "can mostly pay own not-large bills, and only because he's living with his parents, and is steadily and consistently progressing in a low-paying field". Last I checked he's still "in the system" to some extent, as far as ongoing fees and check-ins and such.

(for the record, just to set some parameters here, he didn't physically hurt anyone, but it was still quite serious and definitely not something a society would want to go un-punished, that's absolutely true)

One imagines the long-term lasting harm to all of: victims, families of victims, perpetrators, and families of perpetrators; happening over and over in high-crime neighborhoods and it's no wonder it's so damn hard to improve those areas. That, on top of everything else that's often wrong with them. Reducing, not increasing, the "blast radius" of crime seems like something you'd focus on if you want to reduce crime rates, when stress and poverty are causal for crime and stress and poverty are part of the effect of same "blast radius".