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administration of the community service order in Ireland by the Probation Service may
give rise to greater use of the sanction. However this may not translate into a consistent
approach among the sentencers themselves when dealingwith breaches.
The arrival of the national standards also had a transforming effect on the role of
probation officers and their relationship with clients. Standards imposed by the Home
Office upon the Probation Service, through the national standards, added significantly to
the original controlling function which the Probation Service adopted when they first
began administering community service in 1973 (Nellis 2004). Over the years that
followed the Probation Service could be seen to shift from the traditional role of social
worker, with all the discretionarypractices used within that paradigm to the wider function
of supervisor within the criminal justice system which in part included the social work role.
No longer would the function to advise, assist and befriend solely define the probation
officer. The service was to move to a more conflicting role of enforcing court orders of
communityservice perhaps changing forever the perception of the probation officer as the
offender’s friend.
However, the most significant result of this concerted policy of breaching non-compliant
offenders was the increase in the number of offenders who might receive a custodial
sentence upon being breached (Pease 1980:33-38). This increase in the custodial
population might be considered an unnecessaryincarceration of a cohort of offenders who
might in the first instance not have receiveda custodial sentence (Sparks 1971:398).
COMMUNITY SERVICE AN EVERYDAY PENALTY
Before considering the introduction and use of community service in the Republic of
Ireland in Chapter 3, the emergence of community service as a mainstream penalty in
EnglandandWales was discussedin this chapter and the previous chapter in order to more
fully understand the sanction itself and the sense of expectancy which preceded its
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