The Community Service Order for Youthful Offendors: Perceptions and Effects

Sam Coghlan was Deputy Director and Senior Consultant of the Thames Ontario Library Service Board, Southwestern Ontario.

Canada’s most famed Community Service Order (CSO) caught international attention in 1977, when Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones received a suspended sentence for a drug offence and was ordered to perform a benefit concert for the blind as well. CSOs for juveniles have, however, been a relatively recent development. This book examines such orders by reviewing the situations of 100 young people who were assigned CSOs by the courts in Durham Region, Ontario.

The book examines the general purpose and history of CSOs in the Canadian legal system, then presents the methodology of the study and a description of the Durham CSO Program. This constitutes one-third of the text’s contents. The remainder offers a description of the study’s results.

The researchers compared the study results for the CSO recipients against a matched group of offenders who had received probation but no CSO. Court, police, and school records were examined. Interviews were done with the juveniles concerned, with their parents and probationer offices, and with the agency that found a place for the juvenile to work. Judges were interviewed, as were members of the public, to measure general attitudes toward the use of CSOs as an alternative disposition (to incarceration or fine) for young offenders.

The results of the study are presented in a very straightforward manner in language relatively free from academic jargon, although much attention is applied to justifying methodology. Nowhere do the authors attempt to draw speculative or generalized conclusions from the data they present; in fact, they explicitly caution against making generalizations from this one study. The conclusions they draw are similarly precise: “The CSO program examined in this project appears to be a success.”

The book offers a good and brief insight into how Community Service Orders are administered and how they seem to be working.