Benefit fraud always raises the hackles with many people and rightly so, it's our money and I'm not going to condone what Lucy did for one second, especially given the amount of money involved.
However, whilst it is easy to smugly sit in judgement, if you had got pregnant at 16 like Lucy did, and if you have not had the chances, opportunities or education that some of us have been fortunate to have, I could at least have some comprehension of why people do such things. I grew up in a council house with an outside toilet in a very dubious area and I can easily see how my life could have taken a very different path.
It costs around £3,900 a month to keep somebody in prison and we really have to ask ourselves if that would be an appropriate way of dealing with this matter. When it comes to punishing people we often confuse justice with vengence, and whilst locking her up might "send a message to others" it is going to cost us far more money to incarcerate her than letting her pay back what she owes, and for what purpose? To destroy a young life and possibly a family? She didn't beat up an old lady or break into your home.
We've all seen cases in our local papers where some crook with a record as long as their arm has walked free from court with a fine that they're not going to pay and a community service order that they're not going to fulfil, let alone the number of MPs who were allowed to pay back their fiddled expenses with no further action taken or the multi-nationals who've done cosy tax deals with the Inland Revenue that's saved them billions etc, etc, etc
Only last week there was a story in the media about a gang of thugs who beat a man senseless and left him for dead, laughing and punching the air as they left court with a suspended sentence. One of even even boasted that he had "got away with GBH" (
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/c...-dead.html ) yet a woman juror who looked up a defendant on the internet was jailed for six months for "contempt of court".
Sadly, the justice system is full of the great and good who like lording it over the rest of us and the official sentencing guidelines (
http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/s_to_u/sente...fit_fraud/ ) suggest that Lucy will be very lucky indeed to avoid jail. Only my twopennerthworth, but that would not just be inappropriate, it would be wrong.