View/Open - CORA - University College Cork

They recommended a court should first have to consider a social enquiry report before it
could make a community service order. This latter proposal firmly establishes the inter-
dependent relationship between the Courts and the Probation Service in the making and
execution of community service orders. Additionally, the community service order, they
recommended, should only be imposed after the accused has consented to such an order.
Perhaps the most significant point of departure from the recommendation of the Wootton
Committee Report was the specific recommendation that offenders should onlybe eligible
for community service if they were convicted for an offence punishable by imprisonment
(Pease and McWilliams 1980). This limiting recommendation refocused the community
service penalty as a device which could more clearly function as a genuine alternative to
imprisonment, although the use of the term, imprisonable offence, did not, of itself,
sufficiently confine the exclusive use of community service to cases where imprisonment
wouldbe the most probable alternative.
D. THE LEGISLATION
As expected the Criminal Justice Bill of 1971, which gave effect to the proposals for
community service, was well supported with speakers from both sides expressing a degree
of optimism that at last a penalty would be available that would allow certain offenders,
particularly minor offenders, to avoid imprisonment. The Home Secretary employing
political rhetoric (Young1979) spoke thus:
Those who need not be sent to prison, those who are not guilty of violent crimes
should be punished in other ways in the interest of relieving the strain on the Prison
Service and in the interest of the community. We propose a number of new ideas,
some of them experimental, which will, I hope, be fruitful in the long run. The first
is community service. I was attracted from the start to the idea that people who
have committed minor offences would be better occupied doing a service to their
fellow citizens than sitting alongside others in a crowded jail.(H.C. Deb.vol.826
col.972).
47