Community Service in Denmark: Report on the Experiences With Community Service as a Penal Sanction (From Community Service: A New Option in Punishing Offenders in Europe, P 109-120, 1986, Hans-Jorg Albrecht and Wolfram Schadler, eds. -- See NCJ-116154)

• NCJ Number: 116161
• Author(s): J Balder
• Date Published: 1986
• Length: 12 pages
• Sale Source: Max-Planck-Institute Fur Auslandisches und Internationales Strafrecht
• Publication Type: Program/Project Description
• Language: English
• Country: West Germany (Former)

Annotation

After reviewing the background and history of community service in Denmark, this paper describes the basic features of the community-service-orders experiment and presents court statistics on the orders from September 1, 1982, to October 31, 1985.

Abstract

The legal basis for community service orders in Denmark consists of the penal code rules about suspended sentences. The community service order implies that offenders serve a specified number of hours of unpaid work for the community rather than serve a prison sentence. A minimum of 40 hours and a maximum of 200 hours of service may be imposed for a period of from 4 to 12 months. The proposal for a community service order may be initiated by the court, the public prosecutor, defense counsel, or the local office of the Probation and Aftercare Department. Young offenders who have committed property offenses carrying sentences of up to 6-8 months imprisonment are the "target group" for the community-service-order experiment. In the event of failure to perform the order, an offender is brought back to the sentencing court to determine whether the suspended sentence should be revoked and the prison term served. Data on community service cover the number and percentage of offenders by offense, settled cases distributed by sentence, offender age, hours served, type of service performed, and cause of termination. 8 tables, 17 references.