Does Community Service Affect Offenders' Attitudes? (From Victims, Offenders, and Alternative Sanctions, P 71-88, 1980, Joe Hudson and Burt Galaway, ed. - See NCJ-74113)

• NCJ Number: 74119
• Author(s): S A Thorvaldson
• Date Published: 1980
• Length: 18 pages
• Sponsoring Agency: Laidlaw Foundation; British Columbia Dept of the Attorney-General
• Sale Source: Lexington Books
• Publication Type: Thesis/Dissertation
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Based on paper by author titled, 'The Effects of Community Service on the Attitudes of Offenders,' presented at the University of Cambridge, Institute of Criminology as a doctoral dissertation, 1978.

Annotation

This essay examines the impact that community service sanctions may have on offenders' attitudes toward the criminal justice system and themselves, especially as regards their social and moral attitudes.

Abstract

The author finds additional justification to the penal rationale of community service in the findings of research conducted in England from 1973 to 1975, which explored the aims of the community service (CS) program developed there. The findings of this study, together with a brief review of the relevant literature, were intended to measure the effects of CS on offenders' attitudes having a direct bearing on their social behavior in general, and law-abiding or lawbreaking behavior in particular. The effects of CS on offenders' attitudes were compared with the effects of two other types of sentence (fine and probation). The independent variable in this analysis was type of sentence and the hypothesis was that the CS group would show more positive scores on the attitudes measured than the other groups. The methodology used (questionnaires and interviews) is described in detail. The respondents' attitudes toward the sentence and the criminal justice system, as well as their social attitudes (e.g., sense of justice, self-respect, social responsibility, alienation, anomy) were measured. Making allowances for the Hawthorne effect -the effect of the novelty of CS as a new sentence -- CS was found to be one of the most promising of all new sentence types as inducing measurable, positive offender attitude changes. Endnotes and tabular data are provided.