View/Open - CORA - University College Cork

encountered by others less-fortunate, it was assumed that this would affect a more
empathic attitude on the part of the offender. A series of suggestions are quoted from
social enquiry reports to suggest community service might help the offender to increase
self-confidence and self-respect which the offender lacks at the present time. In contrast
with probation orders which ensure privacy between the probation officer and the
offender the community service order is performed in “full view” of the community
thereby placing an obligation upon the offender “to behave in a responsible and socially
acceptable manner”. Cohen posited the idea of punishment in the community as an
extension of the prison system when he identified the phenomenon of the dispersal of
discipline using the idea of transformations from Foucault (1975:303). He suggests that
the use of punishment in the communityonlyresultedin:
… gradual expansion and intensification of the system; a dispersal of its mechanisms
from more closed to more open sites and a consequent increase in the invisibility of
social control and the degree of its penetration into the social body (Cohen 1985:
87).
Cohen’s sceptical view of community based sanctions contrasts sharply with the
affirmative presentation of what might be possible and salutary if offenders worked
alongside volunteers to the benefit of those less well off in the community as identified by
Wootton.
The latter viewof community, this place where offenders might repaytheir debt to society,
has no negative connotations. However, this benign view of social organisation reaching
its apogee in the idea of community, cannot easily withstand the challenge that there are
many towns, villages and housing estates where the prevalence of drug-taking, public
disorder, drunkenness and violence is so pervasive that the community is incapable of
providing the setting for reparation as the community itself may be a significant
contributing factor to the offender’s criminal behaviour.
64