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In Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was near universal agreement that prison
did not serve the purpose of deterring the convicted criminal from repeating his/her
crimes. While reviews were conducted to identify newsanctions (Advisory Council on the
Treatment of Offenders 1957), it was determined that any new sanction which might be
identified would be subject to a rigorous scientific evaluation before it would receive
approval as a sanction. This critical procedure was in large measure abandoned in favour
of a more pragmatic approach when the issue of communityservice was discussed 13 years
later. Such were the pressures on the penal system at the time, an unproven but
experimental approach to a new sanction was adopted as the way forward. Community
service orders were introduced in the spirit of “penological pragmatism” (Bottoms 1979)
without reference to anyparticular penological objective.
A degree of pragmatism is evident in the Wootton Committee report where theyadvise the
use of a penalty without firstly determining the precise penological basis for it. Moreover,
unlike earlier enquiries which addressed sentencing issues, the Wootton Committee
proceeded to make recommendations for the introduction of this new sanction on an
experimental basis without firstly subjecting the idea to a level of scrutiny and analysis
which was to be the standard measure for anynewproposed sentence from 1957 onwards
(Hood 1974). The approach of “do it and see what happens” speaks more of a pragmatic
approach to resolving demanding social and economic issues concerning the punishment
of offenders rather than proceeding upon an approach which was predicated upon a tested
hypothesis where the elements of the sanction are clearly understood and retain a fixed
meaning.
Indeed, the failure to identify specific penological or criminological aims in this process
was soon to become manifest in the practical working out of the sentence with different
and conflicting sentencing aims seeking to dominate within the relevant criminal justice
agencywhether in the Courts or in the Probation Service at anyone time. The Courts and
the Probation Service perform vastly different functions within the criminal justice system.
The introduction of communityservice combined some aspects of these separate functions
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