This is an opinion column.

It was inevitable. Too good to be true.

It looked, for a moment, like Jefferson County Circuit Judge Clyde Jones understood the harm done when a public servant turns out to be a public drain. It seemed, just 22 days ago, that he understood how easily public corruption turns into public distrust, which turns into apathy and hopelessness and a threat to democracy as we dream of it.

On Oct. 30 Birmingham Water Works board member Sherry Lewis was convicted of two felony ethics charges – of using her position for personal gain and voting on matters in which she or her family members had financial interest – and Jones sent her straight to jail to await sentencing.

No special treatment. No special nothing. Just jail, for a public official who violated the public trust for personal enrichment.

I called it refreshing then. But I feared down deep it would end like this.

Because – unless she screws up big time and violates her probation – Lewis will never spend another day in jail for this corruption. She did her time. Twenty two days.

Jones today sentenced her – a member of a body that has raised customer rates every year for decades and still wound up a billion dollars in debt – to 10 years suspended, with provisions that he can send her back to jail if she slips up. He gave her three years probation, fined her and ordered her to 400 hours of community service.

All that just means he set her free. With time served. Twenty-two days.

Jones, as ABC33/40’s Lauren Walsh reported from the courtroom, said he hoped nobody would take the sentence to understand Lewis’s conduct is tolerated in Jefferson County.

But of course that’s exactly what it does.

It says 22 days is a look-tough-take-it-easy slap on the wrist. It says crime isn’t really crime if it’s done in board rooms and back rooms. It asks why we should bother trusting the government when the government will only take and waste and walk away.

It says the worst of what we expect, at a time we need to expect better.

Prosecutors from the Alabama Attorney General’s office tried to make a case in court that Lewis should do time, that she was not sorry for her actions and said so in a call from jail in which she was recorded saying she had done nothing wrong, Walsh reported.

Former Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford refused to admit he was wrong, too. He darn near died in prison because of it, and people in Alabama believed the state was finally getting tough on corruption.

Former House Speaker Mike Hubbard doesn’t think he did anything wrong either, even though a jury in his hometown convicted him on ethics charges and a judge sentenced him to four years in prison.

At least Jones sent Lewis to prison for three weeks. Hubbard didn’t even have to do that, and he awaits help from a Supreme Court that certainly appears to tolerate his conduct.

Recognizing and prosecuting corruption is critically important in Alabama, as it is across the republic. Trust in government and its institutions is what keeps people engaged and active and involved.

Standards have long required that public officials should be held to a higher standard, that crimes of corruption and ethics failings are bigger than the crimes themselves because public trust is dependent on trusting that those in charge are subject to the law just like the rest of us.

Sherry Lewis broke the law to help herself, and not the people she was selected to serve. She paid for it. For 22 days.

I fear the message it sends, and what comes next.

John Archibald, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a columnist for Reckon by AL.com. His column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Write him at jarchibald@al.com.