Scholars like Norval Morris and Michael Tonry, in Between Prison and Probation , could theorize about the capacity of community service to afford precision--a judge might measure a sentence to fit the seriousness of a crime in increments of days or even hours. Yet perceptions of how to do so varied widely from place to place as judges, program executives, and criminal-justice bureaucrats debated how punishment for crime ought to equate with work.
In New Jersey a recidivist drunk driver might get 90 days of community service; in California the same crime drew only 90 hours. Larger urban states continued to make extensive use of community service sentencing through the s and s. In recent years state legislatures have even mandated community service as part of the sentence for certain offenses. Thus in New Jersey, on any given day, some 40, people are under an order of community service. In Harris County, Texas, which surrounds Houston, 5, defendants perform community service each month.
In the populous counties surrounding Los Angeles and San Francisco, California, judges impose the sentence on thousands of offenders per week. And even in a more rural state like North Carolina, more than 20, offenders are performing sentences of community service at any one time.
Judges typically impose the sentences according to formula--for example, six hours of work equal one day of jail. The offenders are interviewed to determine their skills and availability, then matched with jobs at government or nonprofit agencies. The probation department handles enforcement and eventual referral of failed cases hack to the court for resentencing. Rates of completion vary from place to place, depending on how well the programs are managed and how effectively probation departments or other law enforcement agents actually go after absentees.
PACT assigns caseworkers to work full time on supervision of offenders, visiting the work sites and documenting their progress. In other places, however, supervision and follow-up are much more haphazard; all too often a court learns that offenders failed to complete community service orders only when they are arrested for new crimes.
It is hard to determine how much community service serves as a substitute for jail or prison. The argument for the sanction looks compelling: Sentencing a person to community service spares the huge expense of incarceration.
Yet during the s and early s, researchers seeking out genuine cases of convicts doing community service instead of time behind bars came up relatively empty handed. In a article for Corrections Magazine, Kevin Krajick found a few places where community service appeared to have prevented incarceration of juveniles and only two that credibly did so for adults.
PACT, Krajick reported, set a policy of accepting only convicted felons or misdemeanants who had pleaded down from felony charges. Program officials estimated that without the community service option, about half of the offenders in the program would have gone to jail or prison.
There is some reason to believe that use of the sanction as a genuine alternative increased in subsequent years. As courts continued to feel the pressures of jail crowding, the advantages of community service appeared more obvious than ever, and judges sought ways to make the most of it.
As the federal government brought pressure for tougher laws against drunk driving, for example, community service became the sentence of choice, especially for offenders with stable jobs and families.
Seely says that today, even drunk drivers found guilty of vehicular homicide may wind up working off their debt to society at a community service site rather then doing time behind bars. In addition, states that impose escalating sanctions--intensive probation supervision, electronic monitoring, day treatment, restitution--that substitute for jail may include community service as part of a sentence package.
And a few jurisdictions have set up programs that substitute community service for jail but call it something else. California, for example, runs a sizable "work release" program for people who otherwise would be serving jail terms of a few days or a week.
Offenders sentenced to the custody of the county sheriff may qualify if they have roots in the community, family ties, and a nonviolent record. Elsewhere work release means allowing inmates to work at paying jobs on the outside as they approach the end of jail or prison confinement.
But California's work release offenders never see the inside of a county jail. Instead they report for work cleaning beaches and parks, painting public buildings, or doing other work under constant supervision of a deputy sheriff. In most places that would he called a community service sentence. It began operations in as an experiment of the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit group known for its innovations and research on urban problems, but now operates as part of a freestanding agency.
The CSSP's long record of sound management gives it formidable credibility with the courts and a good reputation with politicians and the news media. CSSP offenders perform some 90, hours of community work per year; recidivism rates are no higher than for offenders sent to jail. More than 70 percent of offenders sentenced to CSSP successfully complete their work assignments.
About 75 percent of those who fail, go back before the courts; overall nearly 90 percent of offenders sentenced to the program either do the work or go to jail. That level of completion satisfies the courts. It's more meaningful to have someone do two weeks of real work than to sit in a jail cell for two weeks. If someone doesn't do it, we'll know. We'll see them back again. By now the CSSP's representatives are familiar figures in city courtrooms. Their job is to screen defendants as they come into court and participate in plea negotiations with prosecutors and defense attorneys.
Defendants with violent records are eliminated, as are those with more than 50 prior arrests. But so are those with no priors at all, on the assumption that they would not be sentenced to jail in any event. The defendants also must submit to an interview with court representatives who insist that they have a verifiable home address and otherwise tell the truth.
Those who survive the grilling gain a strong advocate. The court representative goes before the judge and prosecutor to argue for community service, emphasizing the offender's ties to the community, the need to hold down jail crowding, and the benefits a neighborhood will reap from the offender's work. Since the offender will be working with a public business, careful screening takes place to assure the public's safety.
For the most part, non-violent offenders are chosen for the programme. If for some reason the order is not completed, the offender, the programme coordinator and the probation officer meet to discuss the reasons therefore, and any alternative means of facilitating the order's completion.
Sometimes alterations in the order need to be made; a transfer to a different business must be made; or the offender must reappear for alternative sentencing. Examples of legislation from the United Kingdom include the Criminal Justice Act of which introduced community service orders there. The Act failed, however, to specify that the orders ought to be reparative rather than punitive, resulting in confusion. The Act of somewhat alleviated this problem by authorizing courts to impose community service order as a sole sanction.
A community service programme in Brussels accepts referrals from the juvenile justice system there when community service orders are imposed at sentencing. Community service orders there attempt to achieve proportionality between the seriousness of the offence and the number of hours worked, with other factors taken into account.
The community service programme operates within a protective model as an alternative to institutionalization, which allows orders to be individualized with the best interests of the minor in mind. In the traditional welfare-oriented agencies community service has the potential to become an alternative treatment rather than an alternative sanction.
That is, since the service order meted out often is tailored to the offender and not the offence especially in the juvenile justice model , community service then becomes primarily used to rehabilitate the offender; its reparative motivations become secondary. Moreover, the victim's position vis a vis community service is unclear. The also found it to be a worthwhile experience without losing sight of it as a criminal sanction.
The businesses and agencies also placed a high value on the services provided by the juveniles. However, community service orders do not work well with those who have addictive behaviours. But the primary indicator for an offender is to get back into work. The government, under Chris Grayling when he was the coalition Minister of Justice, they changed the rules in that they introduced privatisation. So the probation service, or probation trusts, as they latterly were called, were replaced by private companies like Serco and Group 4, who were responsible for community service.
And you might ask yourself the question - what evidence is there that private organisations would run community service by offenders or unpaid work better than the public sector?
The answer is none whatsoever. I think it was the playwright Alan Bennett who said recently that profit is now the most trustworthy thing. And if you can get a private company to farm out probation as we knew it and make it paid, so be it. I question it, because A, the lack of evidential base, and B, because what happens is that qualified probation officers are sometimes made redundant.
This is happening right now under our eyes. And we get other people to run community service who are inexperienced and unqualified. But it means that the private companies can pay them less on the road to making profit from this particular enterprise. Well, you might say has the experience of community service changed with all this rebranding? Well, probably not. But only time will tell. Share this post. In this video, he talks about the history of Community Service and reflects on its uncertain future.
Want to keep learning? This content is taken from The University of Sheffield online course. See other articles from this course. This article is from the online course:. Join Now. News categories. Other top stories on FutureLearn. Serco promises to cut costs. The probation union, Napo, warns that this will be achieved by changing the employment conditions of existing supervisory staff and cutting salaries. It is a far cry from the Wootton committee's founding principles that a private company should not make profits on the back of offenders while they are repaying their debt to society.
Blom-Cooper, for one, is saddened that we have moved to an acceptance that profit, not a sense of public service, is the prime driver for certain parts of our criminal justice process. In addition, the government proposes, in its crime and courts bill currently going through parliament, to introduce a mandatory punitive element to every community order. This could include a fine or a curfew, which penal campaigners are warning may undermine community sentences' success in reducing reoffending.
Whether the foundation stones of community service, laid down over the past 40 years, will survive under fragmentation and privatisation is open to question. Those of us fortunate enough to have been involved in its conception and present at its birth, believed that probation could make a difference in offenders' lives, provided that hard work, and clarity of purpose and vision underpinned all our efforts.
Forty years of community service. How did a measure that required offenders to carry out socially beneficial work turn into a form of punishment?
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