Paying off a fine by working outside prison: On the origins and diffusion of community service
| DOI | 10.1177/1477370818819691 |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1477370818819691
European Journal of Criminology
2020, Vol. 17(5) 628 –646
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1477370818819691
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Paying off a fine by working
outside prison: On the
origins and diffusion of
community service
Patricia Faraldo Cabana
Universidade da Coruña, Spain / Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Abstract
Community service is today one of the most significant alternatives to imprisonment, but there
is still much discussion and conflicting accounts of its origins, and little is known about the
ideology that helped to introduce and spread this criminal justice innovation. Throughout the
19th century, unpaid work without deprivation of liberty was conceived and promoted as a
way of paying off fines when offenders’ insolvency precluded payment in money, thus avoiding
imprisonment for defaulters. This article intends to highlight these liberal precedents, but also to
explain the ideology and mechanisms that helped to spread this criminal justice innovation, taking
into account that its diffusion has occurred in different ways, at different times and for varied
reasons in each country. The implementation of community work in Europe has not been linear
and progressive, but rather has been marked by historical differences that have culminated in
varying degrees of success – and relative failure.
Keywords
Alternatives to imprisonment, community service, fines, liberalism, punitiveness, reform
Introduction
This article examines the liberal origins and diffusion of community service, one of the
most significant alternatives to imprisonment. Whereas community service’s recent his-
tory has enjoyed great scholarly attention, there is still much discussion and conflicting
accounts of its origins. Community service’s originality – or lack thereof – has provoked
a considerable amount of debate, with many authors suggesting that the lineage of
Corresponding author:
Patricia Faraldo Cabana, Facultad de Derecho, Universidade da Coruña, Campus de Elviña s/n, A Coruña,
15071, Spain.
Email: patricia.faraldo@udc.es
819691EUC0010.1177/1477370818819691European Journal of CriminologyFaraldo Cabana
research-article2018
Article
Faraldo Cabana 629
community service can be traced back to past penal practices such as penal servitude,
bridewells or impressment (Morris and Tonry, 1990; Pease, 1980, 1985; Van Kalmthout
and Tak, 1988; Vass, 1984, 1990; Young, 1979). Conversely, others argue that commu-
nity service, in its present form, is only superficially connected to these practices and in
reality differs considerably from them (Fuchs, 1985; Kilcommins, 2002, 2014). One
aspect that often remains forgotten in the historical discussions about the lineage of com-
munity service is its relationship to fines or, more accurately, to unpaid fines.1
From the late 18th century and throughout the 19th century, unpaid work without
deprivation of liberty was conceived and promoted as a way of paying off fines when
offenders’ insolvency precluded payment in money, thus avoiding imprisonment for
defaulters. This article is dedicated to highlighting the modernity of these liberal prece-
dents, while simultaneously pointing out the usefulness of community service for the
supporters of new penal initiatives of increasing punitiveness. Firstly, I will explain the
reasoning behind the adoption of unpaid work as a way of substituting for imprisonment
for fine defaulters and, more generally, for short-term prison sentences. Then I will
explore the subsequent difficulties of implementation in various European countries at
the time until the conditions for the emergence of community service orders as we know
them today were present. This emergence during the last third of the 20th century allowed
community work (CW) to develop into an autonomous punishment in the community.
The following section will reveal that the successful diffusion of CW in Europe has
occurred in different ways, at different times and for varied reasons in each country. In
fact, although the conditions for the emergence of CW can be understood only within the
modern penal complex, the diverse trajectories of CW diffusion help explain how its
expansion is attributable to its usefulness for supporters both of the continuity of penal
modernism and of the qualitatively different penal postmodernity. In this way, the article
will explain the ideology and mechanisms that helped to introduce and spread this crimi-
nal justice innovation. This is required because, although ‘scholars treat diffusion as a
natural consequence of innovation’ (Rubin, 2015: 366), many innovations in criminal
justice as regards alternatives to imprisonment were a total failure.
Before proceeding, however, I must clarify my use of terms for this subject. ‘Community
service’ is a concept that achieved its present meaning only in the last third of the 20th
century. Before that, some institutions that allowed a fine to be paid off by working outside
prison were described and labelled differently across jurisdictions. These included forced
or free work of benefit to society, which in turn could be paid or unpaid. All of these labels
were originally conceived of as a way to deal with the problem of fine default. I have opted
to label these ‘community work’, while acknowledging that in many aspects they were
quite different from our current understanding of this concept.
The search for alternatives to imprisonment for defaulters
Imprisonment triumphantly reigned during the 19th century. Only towards the end of the
century did the idea of establishing a punishment of temporary work instead of imprison-
ment begin to spread. This proposal was greatly welcomed in the context of criticisms of
short-term prison sentences and of imprisonment for defaulters, and was almost always
a short-term prison sentence itself. In fact, distinguished representatives of the crusade
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