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Community service on a heritage railway.
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methecooldude
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That would be at the courts discretion surely?
If you are sentenced to a community order, you'll be ordered by a probation officer where to go for Community Payback, you don't get a choice. You need to wear a hi-vis and it will not be pleasant or fun work, and you will be directly supervised by a probation officer and work in a group alongside other people serving the same sentence. It's a punishment as well as a way of giving back to the community. It'll be stuff like repainting sheltered housing, litter picking, weeding public spaces etc.
If it's just speeding, you can't be given a community order. Dangerous driving does attract that penalty though.
pdeaves
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... and as such, 'doing what you normally do' (voluntary work) would not be seen as fulfilling the requirements.
johnnychips
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Perhaps things have changed, but my mate had a community service order twenty years ago. He and his co-offenders picked a bit of litter up in a churchyard and smoked weed the rest of the day. The supervisor wasn’t bothered. Even he was surprised as he accepted he deserved a punishment for what he did.
Cloud Strife
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This actually seems quite shortsighted to me. If someone has particular experience and skills, why waste it on menial activities?
200 hours of volunteering on a heritage railway for someone with specific skills would seem to be far more useful than weeding or removing graffiti.
Weeding and removing graffiti could be exactly the work which needs doing at a heritage railway, that volunteers token is not best spent on.
Would the heritage railway be willing to accept other criminals to provide community service ?
Because it’s a punishment - a sentence imposed by the court normally in lieu of a custodial sentence.
They’ll volunteer anyway and people volunteer on heritage railways because it’s fun and they enjoy it. You aren’t supposed to enjoy community orders.
In any case, community payback has to be supervised by a probation officer and you’re not going to get one on one ratios so you can do what you do every Saturday anyway and play trains, to make up for your criminal offending!
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Yes, this. Community payback normally has about a 20:1 offender to supervisor ratio.
Cloud Strife
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Depends on what they've done. I have a guy in work who did jail time for some good old fashioned white collar crime. It's not a big deal, he's just not allowed to have anything to do with finance.
But if we're offering work in lieu of a sentence, shouldn't the work be productive? If someone has skills valued at 100 quid an hour, why waste them on a 10 quid an hour job?
By education, I'm a qualified teacher. Youth work would be a far productive use of my time than weeding, because I'm actually good at working with teenagers, but I'm hopeless in the garden. If you get me to go weeding, I'll be slow, inefficient and rather useless. If you get me to organise a youth club, I'll have the place packed and filled with happy teenagers.
You can’t do that without a massive probation service. You’d need *individual supervision* if you want to “make use of” people’s skills, like you wanting to organise a youth group. It’s a punishment, and has to be closely supervised so the justice system knows you’ve completed your sentence.
Community payback is done in large groups, and I repeat, is a punishment. Therefore it’s boring, unskilled, menial work capable of being done by any offender. It’s not stuff you like to do, or will do anyway, unless you happen to be a cleaner or gardener or graffiti removal artist for a living.
Yes and you’ll probably hate it. Good. Remember you’re there because you’re a convicted criminal. You’re supposed to dislike it, the same as paying a fine or going to prison or being on a tag isn’t much fun either.
brad465
Veteran Member
Reminds me of when model Naomi Campbell did community service and turned up to each day wearing designer outfits (while doing it at a sanitation department).
To satisfy some peoples petty desire for vengeance.
“Court sentence after committing a crime is a punishment” shocker.
What a daft response, unless you want the probation service to be absolutely enormous to cater for absolute every convict’s personal skills and have them supervised at bespoke placements. How do you even propose it’ll work?
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Some people might wonder why she wasn’t allowed to do modelling for her community payback.
To encourage them to not commit the crime in the first place.
If my normal charge-out rate is £100/hour, then if I commit a crime and end up doing community service at £10/hour, then that is a serious dis-incentive to commit the crime as I could otherwise be earning large amounts of money.
Whilst there is an argument that Community Service should make use of the criminal's skill set, the work needs to be of a sufficiently "nasty" nature to discourage you from committing the crime in the first place.
I seem to recall a few years back when in Madeira, that we took a taxi ride somewhere and saw lots of individuals along the roadside cutting back vegetation or picking up litter - the taxi driver said that they were carrying out community service - they weren't supervised as such, but there were stories about what the Police would do if they didn't carry out the work correctly.
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