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ehabilitative potential and such discretionary practices (Jennings 1990). Besides the
expediency of processing orders already mentioned, the rehabilitative aspects of
community service must be considered as tangential rather than direct applications of
programmatic interventions such as those developed in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
(CBT) and drug addiction treatments in mainstream probation work. Moreover, the hope
expressed by the Wootton Committee that offenders would be significantly influenced by
the experience of communityservice, however well structured and implemented, cannot be
considered other than as a remote possibility of intervention in the attitudes, lifestyle and
behaviours of most offenders and their capacity to re-offend (Varah1987:69). Any claim
that community service is a life changing experience must be taken lightly however much
those rare cases may appear to confound this view. The performance of 200 hours
communityservice is unlikelyto overthrowyears of learned negative experience (N.A.P.O.
1978:18). Nevertheless, community service orders when they are imposed as a direct
alternative to imprisonment, a proportion representing less than fifty per cent of all cases
(Pease1975), must be viewed as less destructive of the socialising habits and abilities of
offenders than the isolation and socially corrosive influence of imprisonment
(Jennings1990).
COMMUNITY SERVICE AND PRAGMATISM
The emergence of community service as a penalty must be understood in the historical,
political, penal, cultural and economic context of the early 1970s. Specifically, the period
must be viewed in retrospect as one of unsettled social outlook and change. The
orthodox view that rehabilitation of offenders required only the proper calibration of
treatment was severely challenged and finally dethroned in the early 1970s (Martinson
1974). The challenge to “scientific” certainties in the social sciences, which owed much to
the philosophy of positivism from an earlier period in the physical sciences, gave way to
pragmatic and common sense explanations (Lonergan 1957) and solutions to seemingly
intractable issues of crime andcriminal behaviour (Bottoms 1979).
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