Thomas Dolan, 20, and Thomas Whittaker, 18, were jailed for 15 and 12 months respectively last month after admitting to causing damage of around £13,000 to trains and bridges in Greater Manchester. A campaign to free them has attracted hundreds of supportive messages online - though a proportion of posters feel the pair's sentence was fair.
The campaign to free them has a Myspace and a Facebook presence. As Eric Allison wrote yesterday, around 200 skateboarders held a rally at the weekend to call for the release of the two, who are known by their tags, Krek and Mers.
The judge said ahead of sentencing that they were "decent people who have talent" but had damaged property and had to be deterred.
Their supporters argue that there must have been a better way of punishing them, and compare their sentences to that of, say, Chris Langham, who last week was jailed for 10 months for downloading child pornography.
For almost a year before being jailed Dolan had worked on a project with young offenders and in schools across Greater Manchester. Some of his supporters feel he should have been given a community sentence drawing on his artistic skills.
One commenter on the Manchester Evening News website, Stephen Billington, would presumably disagree with that. He wrote: "They've got everything they deserve. It's time to get tough on people who disrespect, abuse and damage other people's property and person."
One aspect of the debate is the classic question of whether graffiti is art. Some posters, such as Andy on the BBC website, argue that there are talented artists like Banksy but also "copycat vandals" and low-rent taggers who "unfortunately give the art a bad name".
He feels, though, that prison is not the right answer for Dolan and Whittaker and that vandals should be educated "with the money saved from [putting people in] prison".
