Community Penalties

Community penalties are court-ordered punishments, falling between imprisonment and fines, and involve some contact by a criminal justice agency in a community-based setting. There has been a big increase in their use in recent years, particularly in the context of new forms of technology (e.g. electronic tagging) and community-based restorative justice conferences. Community penalties have been subject to different policy pressures, and it is not at all clear which of these will be dominant in the future. This work, based on papers originally presented at a Cropwood conference on the subject organized by the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, provides a key contribution to this debate. The contributors are leading academic authorities and practitioners in the field.