The Pros And Cons Of Community Service Punishment

As of 2008, roughly 2.3 million American citizens were incarcerated, making up twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoner population . Non-profit organizations such as the Red Cross, local food shelters, Teach for America, and the Boys and Girls Club are always in search of assistance, but yet there are millions of Americans locked away in cells not able to produce any good for society. Within society currently, one of the most efficient and productive ways to produce positive change for the public is to commit time to community service. Individuals who partake in criminal activity take away from society, contributing negative feelings and often times physical destruction to the world around them. Today, a fair share of justice systems around …show more content…
One prospective concern regarding the community service alternative deals with the safety of the public. Rational people want to feel safe in all their surroundings and within our society the role of the government is to help assist in this feeling of security. Take for instance, a man, named Rob, was just convicted of murdering his wife and three children out of selfish intent. In order to guarantee the safety of the public, many would argue that Rob should be secluded from the rest of society in an attempt to minimize any more harm he could cause to the public. Under the community service punishment system this man would be sentenced to decades of community service which would, create immeasurable amounts of utility as mentioned before, but it would allow him to roam free with only the supervision of a police officer monitoring him, thus creating a dangerous situation in which he could repeat his crime. This presents a problem because a society living in fear of potential danger is not an optimally functioning society. Another issue that could arise within this new punishment system is the fact that retributivists would not agree with the severity of the punishment handed to criminals. Retributivists believe that criminals should be punished according to the amount of harm they inflicted upon the public; in a simplified it follows the cliché “ an eye for an eye” . Rob in the previous example, under the current laws would be sentenced to decades in prison or possibly face the death penalty. In the eyes of a retributivist this punishment would be justified because Rob had taken the life of four individuals whom he had no right to murder. Some portion of the public would agree with this punishment because it would inflict the same pain on Rob that he did to his family and the people who cared about the deceased individuals. Under the community service