10-09-2009
Permalink
Chris Brown
Performing
Community Service
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Subject: Community Service's Split Personality
If you monitor the news for mentions of mandatory "community
service", it soon becomes apparent that there are two buckets
into which these reports fall.
The first is the use of "community service" as a punishment for
various criminal offenses in lieu of fines or incarceration. In these
cases, the convicted criminal is sentenced to perform a specified
number of hours of "compulsory
unpaid work" at some designated task. When reviewing the
literature on the theory behind community service punishment, it is
often presented as a cost-effective alternative to incarceration while
also providing two forms of deterrent. First, as a form of public
humiliation for the offender, shaming them into altering their ways.
And second, using this offender as a very visible example to others,
warning them to avoid similar behavior.
The case of Chris Brown is somewhat typical. After pleading guilty to
beating, choking, and threatening to kill his ex-girlfriend, instead
of being jailed, he was ordered to perform 180 days of community
service. As the NY Daily News reports:
"Richmond Police spokesman Gene Lepley said Brown's schedule
will be flexible and include assignments like washing government
cars, picking up trash and cleaning up graffiti."
There are so many things that could be said about this use of
"community service" that it is difficult to know where to begin.
Start by reading about the cases of George Norris and Krister Evertson
in The Washington Times article,
Criminalizing everyone,
and then try and reconcile what is happening to people like these,
while a celebrity who assaults a woman, is expected to do nothing more
than pick up trash, wash cars and clean graffiti as his penalty.
What form of "justice" accommodates a disparity of this magnitude?
And one wonders what standard or principle is being put into practice
that leads to the community, and not the victim of the crime, being the
beneficiary of the services performed? It is certainly not the concept
of victim restitution — or if restitution is being applied, then
it is clear that the court judges the actual crime not to have been
committed agains the individual involved, but against "society" as a
whole, and it is therefore society that should be compensated, while
leaving the victim to lick her wounds.
The second category of mandatory "community service" is the type
of national or community service being implemented by the
Corporation for National
& Community Service through it sub-organizations and programs
including
Senior Corps,
AmeriCorp,
VISTA,
National Civilian Community Corps,
United We Serve,
9/11 National Day of Service,
Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service,
National Service-Learning Partnership, and many others.
On the one hand, we have our government using "community service" as
punishment and a form of public humiliation for bad behavior. So
how is it then possible for the same government to turn around and
tell honest citizens, children and adult alike, that having a
mandatory service requirement forced upon them should be embraced as
a beneficial privilege and an honor? Shouldn't the observant,
thinking individual see the contradiction in this and instead react
to the mandatory requirement as though it were punishment? And the
answers is, yes, of course they should!
And the reason they should is not because the service work is similar
— although most school children are being required to perform
equally menial tasks like collecting trash — the reason is
because the service requirement is being forced upon
them, exactly as it is being imposed by force upon the criminal!
In the case of the criminal, the use of force is justified by the
fact that it is retaliatory force in response to the original
use of force by the lawbreaker, and applicable because the wrongful
actions taken caused the convicted criminal to forfeit their rights.
But in the case of honest people, there is absolutely no justification
for the government's actions. Here, the mandatory service requirement
itself becomes the initiation of force against citizens whose
constitutional rights remain in full force. And it is this distinction
that makes the latter use of mandatory service equivalent to
indentured servitude or slavery.
Nevertheless, the folks who currently control our government are
incapable of making such fine distinctions between the initiation and
the retaliatory use of force, or of seeing a difference between the
unalienable individual rights possessed by each citizen and the
forfeiture of those rights through criminal acts. They are incapable
of seeing these simple facts because they do not recognize the
individual as a sovereign entity. Their collective vision of the the
world extends no deeper than "society", which is recognized as the
sole repository of rights and privileges. People — the citizens
of a country — are the raw material of that society — a
natural resource to be applied by the collective's whim and will to
those societal issues and problems deemed by the controlling elite to
be worth addressing. It is from this viewpoint that the two wildly
different classes of mandatory community service discussed above, merge
into one. There is no fundamental difference between a man who
beats a woman and a second grade school child. Both are warm bodies
that must be trained to bend to the will of the group. And as George
Orwell so clearly identified long ago, it is not just your actions
— but your thoughts, that must be bent.
So the next time you see someone in a red jersey picking up trash
along the side of the road, think of all the sons and daughters being
indoctrinated by NEA teachers in the ways of "service-learning",
to become just one more generation incapable of thinking their way
out of a paper bag, having no idea that, once upon a time, there were
people — individuals — who possessed a right to their
life, their liberty and their property, and made independent choices
in directing the course of their lives without the intervention or
necessary approval of their "community". See that road worker —
and then get mad enough to do something to stop this insanity!
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