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Insofar as it is possible to discern the intended class of offenders who might be suitable to
receive a community service order instead of a custodial sentence, the operation of the
penalty in practice could be said to have reached its target, whatever about the extent to
which it mayhave been applied to the same target group. Communityservice as operated
in Ireland is almost exclusively a penalty reserved for cases disposed of in the District
Court where the maximum penalty on conviction is twelve months imprisonment.
Various structural elements have been exploredin this chapter to explain whythe penaltyis
almost “locked” into that limited jurisdiction. In practice the possibility of using
community service as a decarcerative devise for offenders to be sentenced to longer terms
of imprisonment does not present in the data, leading one to conclude that the current use
of community service in Ireland has achieved its target group of minor offenders who
might have been given a short term of imprisonment. However, the extent to which the
District Court applies the penalty of community service relative to the degree in which it
actually imposes a custodial sentence suggests, when compared to international
comparators, that communityservice is underusedin respect of the same target group.
The decline in the use of communityservice as a penaltyhas been discussedin this chapter,
particularly in light of the significant increase in the use of imprisonment as a penalty over
the past fifteen years. Certain reasons have been put forward to explain this trend which
bears upon a re-orientation of political and criminal justice perspectives. In the political
sphere sentiment has hardened over the past two decades where desert based penalties are
promoted and preferred while in the judicial sphere the courts have shown a growing
preference to supervised sentences, whether by way of review of sentences or deferred
supervision, which presents a departure from an earlier era where finality and therefore
certainty, at least as to the meaning of the sentence, whatever about its execution, was the
norm.
Since its inception in 1983 the community service order has always been presented within
the statutory framework as a direct substitute for an actual custodial sentence. However in
the following chapter the first attempted rupture of this policy is analysed in respect of
children aged 16 and 17 years under the Children Act 2001. In this legislation, community
service is seen to emerge as an intermediate sanction without consideration of the prior
custodial requirement.
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