When a person is sentenced to community service by a court what are they being told to do? Is it unpaid labor? Maybe cleaning roadsides. If you are supposed to do something for others, like serving in a soup kitchen how could it be determined you are doing your job properly. Does the court make certain someone like a sex offender doesn’t have a chance to bother others?
In the county Diversion court I worked at, community service had to be at a nonprofit. The person had to check with us ahead of time that it was actually a nonprofit organization and that it was an acceptable place.
In some places, they may assign you to a particular organization.
ETA: it’s unpaid. Also, where I was, a sex offender isn’t going to be assigned community service. It’s only for low-level offenders who aren’t a danger to anyone. They also have to have their service hours signed off on by a supervisor at the place they’re volunteering.
I think this is the most common one. You get a group of people who’ve been sentenced to community service and you have them meet somewhere with a county employee to supervise them. Then they walk alongside some roads or through a park picking up litter.
Here’s how it works over here:
It was the setting for a TV dramedy series:
Snitching can be a community service. No work detail required. It’s up to the probation department to accept this as meeting the required commitment to the terms of the judges order.
Wherd I live, there are various organizations which work regularly with the courts and probation officers to recieve useful (and free)employment for their own needs, while also meeting the requirements of the court.
One such organization is a hospital. They use (properly vetted) minor criminals to work in the laundry and housekeeping jobs. Each community service ‘employee’ works alongside regular employees in that department. The supervisor of those employees files a report with the court , showing the time sheet and any behavioral issues of the community service person.(zero tolerance allowed., so the community service person is usually a very good worker.)
Another organization is the local humane society. They use court-ordered community service people to do janitorial and landscaping work. With supervision and reporting to the probation officer by the same manager who supervises the regular employees.
There are also snap inspections by the probation officer.
When I worked for an environmental nonprofit, we routinely got volunteers who needed community service hours. They’d come for a day and help with the gardening, natural building, library organizing, whatever we happened to need they day. They worked with the other volunteers and staff and everyone got a free lunch. At the end of the day I signed their forms saying they did X hours.
Worked out for everyone, I think.
When I was in college, I delivered pizzas with a guy whose community service was feeding euthanized animals into the incinerator. He said it was a horrible job for about five minutes before he realized about 99% of his shift was reading a book waiting for the next cart to arrive. I’m not sure if that was for a local ASPCA or the county pound.
We refer to them as ‘Weekend Warriors’…& not in a complimentary way. They are frequently the DUIers, serving their sentence 48 hrs at a time so that they are able to keep their job.
On the plus side, he was getting in real good with Baal.
My friend in Finland was “drafted” - you can do either military or community service. He ended up as a museum guide - a job which he loved.
Of note, it’s not just criminals who have to do x number of hours of community service. It’s often now required of high school students, for instance, as a general graduation requirement (i.e., not a punishment). Or for various organizations, like the Boy Scouts.
Anyone who runs a nonprofit activity of any sort is familiar with the paperwork (or nowadays, computerwork) in verifying service hours for various volunteers.
Yep - where I am, it’s specifically called “service learning” to differentiate it from penal community service.
When I volunteered at a Habitat ReStore, we had a lot of community service volunteers, and also at the Christmas project sponsored by the newspaper, for needy families, when I lived in my old town. Most of them had things like speeding tickets or some kind of property offense where they often had a choice between a fine, or community service.
In that old town, I worked with a man who was in college, and he got in some pretty big trouble at a street fair, for throwing beer on a cop. In the end, he had the charges reduced to public intoxication and disorderly conduct, and had a fine and something like 100 hours of community service. When they found out he worked at a hospital, they allowed him to do it concurrently with his job.
Wow. I’m surprised an organization would use a volunteer for something like that.