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What Is the Impact of Community Service?

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Abstract

Unpaid work by offenders—most commonly referred to as community service—is available as a penal measure in many countries worldwide and has become one of the most popular community sentences among the public and the judiciary. This is mainly because it serves numerous purposes and aims—such as diversion from custody, reduced costs to the criminal justice system, reparation and rehabilitation—and because it can be seen to provide tangible benefits for the community. This same diversity, however, means that the effectiveness of community service may be assessed in a number of ways and its popularity as a penal sanction has also resulted in accusations that it may serve to widen the net of social control.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Although unpaid work by offenders is referred to using a variety of terminology—both across jurisdictions and within individual jurisdictions at different points in time—the term ‘community service’ is widely recognised internationally and is therefore used throughout this chapter except in referring to specific legislative or policy initiatives in which alternative terminology is employed.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Stirling, Stirling, UK

    Gill McIvor

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  1. Gill McIvor
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow School of Social and Political Sciences, Glasgow, United Kingdom

    Fergus McNeill

  2. Faculty of Sociology, University of Bucharest Faculty of Sociology, Bucharest, Romania

    Ioan Durnescu

  3. HU University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands, UTRECHT, The Netherlands

    René Butter

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McIvor, G. (2016). What Is the Impact of Community Service?. In: McNeill, F., Durnescu, I., Butter, R. (eds) Probation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51982-5_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51982-5_6

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