What is the difference between prison and community service

Then, the case is referred to a programme coordinator who makes the appropriate placement. Where no such programme exists, a pre-sentencing report is given to the judge suggesting community service. In Washington, the typical order requires the offender to perform between and fifty and two hundred hours of work. Since the offender will be working with a public business, careful screening takes place to assure the public's safety.

For the most part, non-violent offenders are chosen for the programme. If for some reason the order is not completed, the offender, the programme coordinator and the probation officer meet to discuss the reasons therefore, and any alternative means of facilitating the order's completion. Sometimes alterations in the order need to be made; a transfer to a different business must be made; or the offender must reappear for alternative sentencing.

Examples of legislation from the United Kingdom include the Criminal Justice Act of which introduced community service orders there. The Act failed, however, to specify that the orders ought to be reparative rather than punitive, resulting in confusion. The Act of somewhat alleviated this problem by authorizing courts to impose community service order as a sole sanction. A community service programme in Brussels accepts referrals from the juvenile justice system there when community service orders are imposed at sentencing.

Community service orders there attempt to achieve proportionality between the seriousness of the offence and the number of hours worked, with other factors taken into account. The community service programme operates within a protective model as an alternative to institutionalization, which allows orders to be individualized with the best interests of the minor in mind.

In the traditional welfare-oriented agencies community service has the potential to become an alternative treatment rather than an alternative sanction. That is, since the service order meted out often is tailored to the offender and not the offence especially in the juvenile justice model , community service then becomes primarily used to rehabilitate the offender; its reparative motivations become secondary. Moreover, the victim's position vis a vis community service is unclear.

Meet the Editors. What kind of community service can a judge order? Judges have a lot of discretion in what community service they can order, but the sentence must bear some relationship to the crime.

Not Available for Serious Crimes Community service may be ordered as a stand-alone sentence or as a condition of probation for many types of crimes, and in fact may be a required condition of punishment for crimes like looting or damaging property. This donation of charitable services in a public forum benefits the community in two ways: it serves as a deterrent to other potential offenders, and it provides a symbolic and practical form of restitution for the harm the defendant caused.

Connection to the Crime While there are many forms of community service that can benefit the public, there must be a direct connection between that service and the crime. Substance abuse programs In many instances, judges determine that the community will benefit from a substance-abusing offender entering a rehab program. Typically, judges will also require the offender to do work over and above program participation, like one or more of the following: sponsoring or counseling other substance abusers leading treatment meetings or programs at the facility organizing or setting up treatment meetings paying restitution to harmed parties.

Offenders' Rights Although they have considerable leeway in setting sentences, judges can't impose community service that unduly interferes with an offender's due process rights, including the opportunity for paid employment, the maintenance of a normal family life, and the preservation of a stable home environment.

Examples of sentences that courts have found invalid include: the forfeiture of all of an offender's assets, including his home, in addition to full-time charitable work for three years community service involving physical labor that the offender is unable to perform due to age or infirmity, and banishing an offender from her home and community where the offense wasn't a sex crime.

Capping the Service Term The period of community service a judge orders can't go beyond the maximum sentence for the crime. Consult an Attorney If you've been charged with or convicted of an offense and wonder whether community service is possible, consult an experienced criminal defense attorney.

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Fraud Charges. Malicious Damage. Table 5 shows the robustness of our findings to hidden bias across the different follow-up periods. The significance level p critical represents the bound on the significance level of the treatment effect in the case of endogenous selection into treatment status. Given the direction of our results a situation of positive self-selection will actually cause our findings to be conservative estimates.

We therefore only focus on negative self-selection into treatment. The longer the follow up, the least robust our findings are to selection effects. Thus, our conclusion that recidivism after community sentence is lower than that after imprisonment would need to be questioned if an unobserved variable would increase the odds of receiving community service for the offenders actually sentenced to community service by 20 to 50 percent versus offenders sentenced to imprisonment.

To illustrate the magnitude of hidden bias that would render our findings spurious, the critical levels expressed in Table 5 can be compared with the impact on being sentenced to community service instead of imprisonment of observed variables, which impact is known from the propensity score model.

Footnote 15 Considering the average number of property crimes for offenders sentenced to community service was 0. Similarly, the critical level of hidden bias would need to equal a difference of 1.

These results illustrate the level of hidden bias that could be in the data without changing the inference about the treatment effects. The objective of this study was to compare recidivism rates after first community service to that after first imprisonment up to six months in a sample of adult Dutch offenders convicted in We employed both matching by variable and propensity score matching to control for possible selection into sanction type.

We also assessed the robustness of our results to hidden bias due to unobserved confounders. Our results show that offenders recidivate significantly less after community service than after imprisonment.

This result is in line with results from prior research Bol and Overwater ; Killias et al. In the short term as well as in the long term, community service is followed by less recidivism than imprisonment; nearly half as many reconvictions over an eight-year follow-up period. The absolute difference in recidivism after community service and imprisonment is 1. The strengths of our study are in the representativeness and size of the cohort, the detailed criminal history information available for the offenders in our sample, and the cutting edge methods used to account for selection effects.

It is also important to note that in the end our results are not based on a random experiment whereby offenders were randomly assigned to either community service or imprisonment. Therefore, caution is warranted when interpreting these results in terms of causality. Studies using observational data always remain vulnerable to hidden bias resulting from unobserved variables. Conducting true experiments that introduce randomness in the sentencing decision thus remains desirable.

Still, the results of the sensitivity analysis give confidence that in the current study the observed differences in post-sentence recidivism are unlikely to be due to pre-sentence selection effects.

Footnote At this moment, our data do not allow any comprehensive evaluation of the causal mechanisms underlying our results. Yet, if indeed our findings point to a causal effect of community service relative to imprisonment, deterrence theory seems unlikely to be important in explaining differences in recidivism following these sanction types. With the required prudence, we can conclude from our results that deterrence does not play a dominant role in the total of effects of community service and imprisonment on recidivism.

Assessing the relative importance of learning, social control or labeling processes is clearly beyond the scope of our data, especially since these processes all seem to interlock. For future research, it is highly relevant to test causal structures behind the effect of official interventions on recidivism.

If our findings reflect an effect of community service relative to imprisonment, our results are of great relevance to policymakers. Incarcerating offenders is very costly compared to sentencing offenders to community service; in the total cost of imprisoning adult offenders in The Netherlands amounted to nearly one billion Euros Moolenaar Even apart from the direct benefits resulting from the labor performed by community workers, imprisoning offenders in The Netherlands is currently approximately 8 times more costly than letting them perform community service.

Imprisoning one offender for six months will cost the Dutch taxpayer 34, Euros, while the costs for hours of community service replacing these six months of imprisonment amount to approximately 4, Euros Moolenaar ; Junger-Tas So, if community service also results in less recidivism, the benefits resulting from these crimes prevented will further tip the balance in favor of community service. Furthermore, the humane costs of community service are lower as community services place emphasis on resocialization and reintegration and less on retribution.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that imprisonment prevents offenders from committing crimes by physical isolation and might prevent individuals becoming first-offender via the principle of general deterrence. Furthermore, for victims of crime, imprisonment might satisfy feelings of retribution more than community service. Thus, for the present, in terms of post-sentence recidivism as well as financially, community service seems to provide a good alternative for imprisonment.

What is also noteworthy in this regard is that, despite the fact that first-time imprisonment in The Netherlands averages around two months, its negative effects compared to community service continue to resonate even over an eight-year follow-up. That such short-term imprisonment is associated with long-term criminogenic effects is not encouraging in light of the expanded use of imprisonment in response to crime.

These are studies conducted at least at the fourth level of the Scientific Methods Scale see Sherman et al.

In short, the Maryland Scientific Methods Scale is a simple five-point scale of methodological quality. It is argued that objective conclusions can only be drawn when studies are conducted on at least the fourth level. Quasi-experimental studies compare an experimental group and a control group. Individuals are not randomly assigned to these groups. However, these studies statistically control for confounding variables or the studies show clearly that the groups are comparable on these confounding variables.

In studies with an experimental design at least one internal variable is manipulated, i. Specific deterrence — the discouraging effect of official sanctions on those who actually underwent these sanctions - can be distinguished from general deterrence - the discouraging effect official sanctions have on the population writ large. Here our focus is only on the effect of punishment on the punished.

Various other quasi- experimental studies have examined the effects of imprisonment, however, not compared to community service, but to, for example, a fine, prosecutorial waiver, or pardon see, e. Her,e we only overview those studies that compared recidivism after imprisonment with that after community service for adult offenders. Studies using regression techniques generally show that differences in recidivism rates that favor alternative sanctions diminish when more control variables are added to the model Nagin et al.

This again underlines the importance of using a quasi- experimental design comparing the treated with adequate controls when trying to estimate the effects of non-custodial versus custodial sanctions. The authors address in their study that previous time spent in prison was not a sufficient determinant of criminal history of offenders.

There is a statistically almost significant difference found in terms of unconditional prison sentences during the three years preceding the sentence between the experimental and control groups.

In The Netherlands, the minimum age of criminal responsibility is 12 years. The decision to only include offenders aged 18 to 50 is made for various reasons. First, the largest share of offenders sentenced to community service was in this age-range Second, for under-aged, other arrangements are valid compared with adult offenders.

In order to decrease heterogeneity within each group, we choose to only analyze adult offenders. To put our sample in a proper Dutch perspective: in , of all offenders sentenced to imprisonment first time or otherwise , Sentencing practices in The Netherlands are therefore quite different and more lenient than the United States. The, by U. The categorization of length of sentence: 1 community service up to 61 hours or up to 1 month imprisonment; 2 community service of 61— hours or 1—2 months imprisonment; 3 community service of — hours or 2—3 months imprisonment; 4 community service of — hours or 3—4 months imprisonment; 5 community service of — hours or 4—5 months imprisonment; 6 community service of — hours or 5—6 months imprisonment.

Note that to prevent interference from feed-back effects, all offenders who were previously sentenced to either community service or imprisonment were excluded from analysis. The criminal history of the offenders is thus related to, for example, fines.

The formula for the standardized difference statistic—in percentages—as suggested by Rosenbaum and Rubin is:. To conduct the analysis, we invoke the user-written Stat routine—mhbounds—developed by Becker and Caliendo Another drawback of this study is that there remains a possibility that an undefined number of community services are converted to imprisonment in a later stadium, for example when offenders do not show up or complete their community service.

Since imprisonment cannot halfway be converted in community service, any bias resulting from this will lead to an under- rather than an overestimation of the difference in post-sentence recidivism. Akers, R. Deviant behavior: A social learning approach 2nd ed.

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