View/Open - CORA - University College Cork

The use of impressment must also be understood in the context of political and economic
exigencies. The Land Enclosure Movement in the latter 18 th Century created significant
social unrest among the dispossessed cottier classes. The use of impressment into the
armyor the navyacted as a safetyvalve against social unrest which occasionallymanifested
in agrarian riots.
Whatever the attenuated similarities with preceding work-related penal sanctions,
Kilcommins (2002) cautions against viewing community service as the inevitable outcome
of some unfolding logic, demonstrating that the history of community service is not a
historyof programme refinement of the modern modalityof punishment.
Specifically, Kilcommins challenges the conventional viewexpressed byPease (Pease 1980)
that community service had a long history dating back four hundred years. Pease’s
conception of impressment, he contends, is methodologically flawed as it is constructed
upon a teleological paradigm which precludes the possibilityof viewing the past other than
in terms of the present. Although impressment involvedthe substitution of imprisonment
with naval or military service, the similarity with community service is over-stretched in
Pease’s analysis through a process of exclusion of features which do not fit neatly into the
linear historyof work-related sanctions. In particular the essential elements of the denial of
leisure and rehabilitation are historically absent in the earlier work-based dispositions.
Rather than presenting impressment as a proto community service order, Kilcommins
points to discontinuities between impressment and community service which invites an
understanding of community service as a discrete modern disposition which can only be
properly understood in the context of contemporary rather than historical referents.
(Kilcommins 1999:240).
Rehabilitation, Kilcommins contends, must be understoodas a feature of the modern penal
welfare structure identified byGarland, rather than as an enduring element of penological
sentiment andpractice of an earlier age:
As such, rehabilitation is verymuch part of the modern penal welfare structure, prompted,
as it was, bythe rise to prominence of psychologists, probation officers, social workers
andeducationalists; bythe movement, where possible fromencellulement to
association; bythe displacement of the moral consciousness concept of criminal
behaviour (moralism) with a more inductive, individualisedapproach (causalism); and
the adoption of science as a proper means of reclaimingoffenders. Given these
criteria – criteria which wouldnot have remainedconstant andcontinuous over time –
it is submitted that it is a historical myth to propose that an analogycan be drawn
30