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Youngchallenges the uncritical acceptance bymanyof the ideologyof community.
“Community is not a unitary concept” he claims (1979:42), but includes even those who
would see themselves occasionally belonging to groups, whether defined ethnically or by
some other political criterion as quite apart from, and sometimes in opposition to,
mainstream social categories. These issues are compoundedin multiethnic societies.
Another rehabilitative component consideredwas the constructive use of leisure time.
Boredom, especially among young offenders, was considered a key contributing factor in
offending behaviour. The provision of community service could be considered an
opportunity to disrupt these periods of boredom and inactivity for certain offenders
although Young also suggests that such use of community service could be considered as
incapacitation rather than rehabilitation. Field probation officers reported to him in his
studies that such use of community service may equally serve as an outlet for energies and
abilities therebyreducingthe motivation to commit a crime.
Sometimes the experience of an offender on community service schemes, especially
schemes which offer interpersonal assistance, mayprovide an opportunityfor the offender
to identifywith the aims of such a scheme and on occasion mayeven engender a desire on
the part of such an offender to continue on as a volunteer in such a scheme or train in a
professional discipline in skills related to the project. This phenomenon of the client
becoming a professional helper is not unknown in the addictions field having been
identified in the American literature as “new careers” especially emerging from the anti-
poverty programmes in the United States in the 1960s. Such workers are invested with a
vast lived experience which professionals trained by orthodox education could rarely
achieve. Young’s studies of the earlyschemes provide evidence of the stated desire on the
part of a significant number of clients to continue to be involved in the schemes on
completion of court mandated hours, although those who do pursue voluntary
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