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CONCLUSION
This chapter has attempted to locate the new penalty of community service in Irish
sentencing policy and practice, with particular reference to the penalty of community
service which had operated in the neighbouring jurisdiction of England and Wales for a
decade before its introduction in Ireland. Similar exigencies in both jurisdictions have
been identified, such as the growth in the crime rate coupled with an acute crisis in prison
accommodation, which point to a common theme in political and official discourses.
Notwithstanding the official disavowal that prison was too expensive for the punishment
of certain offenders, the positive aspects of community service were accentuated in the
White Paper preceding the introduction of community service in Ireland. Few if any
could point to the advantages of imprisonment except for the imposition of punishment
and incapacitation. However, the early release of prisoners negated that punitive and
incapacitative effect. The possibilityof rehabilitation or redemption in Irish prisons in the
early 1980s was negligible while any special or general deterrent effect upon offenders
sentenced to imprisonment could not be detected having regard to the recidivist profile of
the vast majorityof prisoners.
The White Paper and the Oireachtas debates were imbued with a spirit of optimism for the
new way forward in sentencing. This optimism, not unnaturally, fixed upon the positive
features of communityservice, particularlythe opportunityto allowreform of the offender
byrehabilitation and byreparation to the community. Notwithstanding the views of Pease
and Young that community service was essentially a punitive measure, at least at the birth
of such penalty in Ireland, most actors participating in its introduction, presented
community service as a penalty capable of delivering upon its claims to be reparative,
rehabilitative and punitive all at once. New departures generally evince a sense of
optimism, even when dissembling is used to hide the true reasons for introducing anynew
measure. The projected cost of dealing adequately with prison overcrowding “appalled”
the government of the day. This “optimism disease” which Salmon Rushdie (Midnights
Children) identified at the inception of the states of Pakistan and India was not absent
either when community service was introduced in 1983 in Ireland. In the succeeding
years, a more sober consideration of community service emerged when the penalty settled
into everydayuse.
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