Prison a good option - for tax defaulters

The government's hypocrisy over prison sentencing has been well pointed out in the following comments which come from a former porbation officer who was fired for trying to do his job properly:

The case of the 69 year old tax protester being imprisoned demonstrates four things:
1) Apparently there are sufficient places in prison. If there were not, the government has used a place to imprison someone who represented no risk of harm to the public in lieu of allocating the place to a dangerous offender who should have been removed from society for public protection.

2) Community sentences don't work. If the government believe that the Probation Service's "Interventions" programmes are so successful at reforming offending behaviour, why was this woman not considered? I suspect that many of the junkies that Josephine Rooney have complained about blighting her neighborhood are offenders being "supervised" in the community. Had Rooney been offered the support of a compassionate criminal justice system, it's almost certain that she would have seen the "error" of her ways and paid the fine, being yet just another in a long string of successes at reforming offenders.

3) The government's actions in jailing Rooney for (3) months for failure to pay a 798.97 tax bill belie their position that jail is just too costly. I believe that I read somewhere that the cost of incarcerating an offender for one year was over 70K. If that number is correct, they will have squandered 17,5K banging up the pensioner.

4) they agree with you partly that there should be no mitigation for certain offenses. Rooney will have to serve the FULL (3) months of her sentence in custody, but a violent offender will be cut loose at the halfway point. Her case clearly indicates that the government doesn't believe the BS that they're peddling to the public.