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The voluntary movement which over the past thirty years appears to have gone into
decline must be understood in the context of its time. The idea of grafting a criminal
sanction onto the altruistic voluntary movements in the early 1970s might not readily
suggest themselves today as a positive solution to the problem of devising penalties for
offenders. In the short few decades since 1970 public, political and legal sentiment has
shifted into a more punitive mode where issues of risk and desert play a more prominent
role.
The extent to which this reintegrative perspective endures, as offenders are increasingly
separated from the influence of volunteers, is clearly a defining issue for community
service. If the integrated perspective is singularly predicated upon the joint participation
of volunteers and offenders, the absence of such an influential joint enterprise calls forth
an increasingly punitive perspective and the role of community service merely as a theatre
for retribution.
The therapeutic role of community service is seen in the literature as subordinate to its
primary punitive function and is at times confused. The origins of this confusion can be
traced to the Wootton Committee recommendation that community service orders should
be administered by the Probation Service, an agency within the criminal justice system,
which was by tradition and training firmly rooted in a world view which saw the offender
as a person in need of care and assistance rather than deserving of punishment. The role
of the Probation Service in this regard will be discussed later, but for the purposes of the
present discussion the resistance by the Probation Service to the transformation of at least
part of their functions as penal agents must be recognised (Nellis 2004). Probation
officers have traditionallytried to “advise, assist and befriend” the offender on a probation
order by identifying the offender’s needs and emphasising his strengths as a route to
rehabilitation. The criteria by which such professional intervention by the probation
officer might be measured would certainly include any perceptible change in either the
attitude, lifestyle or behaviour of the offender at the end of the probationary process. In
stark terms, if the intervention does not bring about sufficient change in the offender’s
behaviour such intervention might be considered a failure. However, a change in
behaviour on the part of the offender on completion of a community service order would
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