I agree with mcmouse - why should we fund him even more? No, far better instead of handing him a suspended 28 week prison sentence would have been to have ordered him to do a couple of hundred hours unpaid community service. In that way, he would have been making a far more positive repayment to the very society he's been filching from all these years
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And of course he must also somehow have to repay the amount he stole. If that means some kind of asset stripping, so be it.
He's in Cheshire, probably a Mail reader. Imagine the stigma of a Wail reader being banged up for a working-class crime - that's why the judge let him off.