Obviously, crying poverty is not a valid excuse for robbing people, and these athletes can't really cry poverty anyway. They are well taken care of.
However, the whole stipend issue is presented by detractors in a misleading way a lot of the time. It's not really "paying" players, because if you did that, they would be entitled to much, much more money. It is actually doing what was done before, and what is done with some other scholarships, which is to provide additional money to insure that the player is able to focus on getting an education and meeting their obligations as a student athlete. We have heard of various scenarios in which players have children, a mother that needs to be taken care of, etc... Considering that some estimates place the time and effort of being on an NCAA team as a 40 hour a week workload, in addition to their classes. We can't really expect them to have a job during football season, and be full time student athletes.
So, when you analyze this situation, there is no justification for the actions. However, if you look at Calloway specifically, I do think you can see how having some pocket money could have dispelled what ever motivation he had to participate in using the stolen card. Yes, bad kids will be bad kids, and criminals will be criminals, but it could lessen some temptation. The same goes for players that get caught on a violation that is not huge sums of money, but a few hundred or may be a thousand bucks. If they are getting that much every month anyway, it would be a lot less enticing to risk losing it over a small sum.
These players have no excuse, but there's no doubt in my mind that a small stipend is not only fair, but could ease the burden on some of these players. Yes, they are getting a lot out of this situation, but so is the University and it's not fair that student athletes can't get a stipend, but people on academic scholarships can.