Community Service As Punishment

Community service constitute an apologetic reparation that the person is now required to make to the community what he has wronged. The Indian Penal Code was the enacted in 1860 by virtue of the classic legal draftsmanship of Lord Macaulay. If there would have been a concept of community service prevalent at that time then the authors are sure that there would have been no need to urge the inclusion of the same in the Indian Penal Code. But since this exclusion by Macaulay is because of no fault of his it is our duty to incorporate such to meet the demands of the time and to make the IPC a living social document. Section 53 of the IPC [2] provides for the various types of punishments. But these are old and do not meet the exigencies of the present day globalised world. The authors yearn for inclusion of community service as a mode of punishment. Indian draftsmen have not overlooked the necessity of such a restorative mode in recent enactments. We find the inclusion of community service in The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2000 [3] (Section 15 [4] ).Community service is defined as an order that requires an offender (who must consent and be aged at least 16) to perform unpaid work for between 40 and 240 hours under the supervision of a probation officer. Formerly known as a Community Service Order. It can also be defined as

‘A community order which requires the offender to do unpaid work in the community under the supervision of a probation officer.’ [5] Moreover the work that the offender is required to undertake has some obvious relation to the nature of offence. [6]
History of community service

The first organized community service program meant systematically to be used in place of short prison sentences were established in ad-hoc basis in California in the 1960’s. . Thus community service was indirect alternative to imprisonment. [7] In the United Kingdom, Parliament enacted legislation in the early 1970 's giving the courts