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within one year. The inevitability of such proceedings is a fact which is foreign to
both probation officers and to many of their clients, who, in the past have
respectively either threatened, or have been subject to threat of, borstal or detention
centre recall etc – a threat more often than not specifying nothing. The community
service order offers no roomfor laissez-faire. (Phipps 1975:.88).
Had the community service order in England and Wales been introduced expressly as an
alternative to custody, its penal content might not have been relegated to the background
(Young 1979:139); nor would it have had to compete for primacy with other sentencing
demands. This might have removed some of the ambivalent features of the sentence.
The role of the Probation Service in administering the sanction within such a punitive
paradigm, while clearly challenging their traditional professional perspective, might have
rendered their function, ultimately, less ambiguous.
Arguably, when community service is understood primarily as a punitive measure (West
1977:117) the exercise of discretion bythose who supervise communityservice requires the
adoption of procedures which may be anathema to their traditional social work practices
and training (Parsloe 1976; Halton 1992). Every interpersonal endeavour requires a degree
of mutual consideration and negotiation. The interpersonal dynamics in the relationship
between a marginally willing offender to perform community service and a probation
officer are likely to lead in any direction without clearly expressed procedures and
expectations. Baroness Wootton’s amendment to the Bill in the House of Lords, which
requires the Court to give prior detail to the offender as to the nature and requirements of
communityservice, can onlybe interpreted as giving a formal expression to the consensual
nature of the penalty. The offender is more likely to respond to clearly stated rules and
procedures such as warning letters in cases of failure to turn up for work if the limits of the
probation officer’s discretion are known and communicated clearlyto him/her in advance.
Notwithstanding the socially desirable features of community service as described in the
Wootton Report such as rehabilitation and reparation, which aims have always been the
primary focus of the Probation and After-care Service, the adoption of the supervisory
function of communityservice bythe Probation Service has shifted the professional axis of
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