Topic: Do you agree that community service works better than fines?
Ever since the dawn of society, people have tried to break the rules imposed to them.
This started a sort of race to come up with the best and most effective form of punishment in
order to correct this type of behavior. More recently, a lot of people have been debating on
the community service work as a form of punishment and its efficacy. This essay is going to
go over two advantages of it, effort and time and also the lessons learned, and as a matter of
comparison will put it up against the traditional fine.
Many people argue with the fact that the effort and time someone convicted with
community service as a form of punishment is less effective than the impact generated by a
fine. While I can agree to a certain extent, what this opinion fails to take into account are
people who don’t really care about money because they have a high salary. To be more exact,
if someone is in a position which earns him 100.000 per month then he won’t really care that
much if he speeds multiple times, since the fines are not that high. Raising them is not a
solution in my opinion either, since they would make lower-income people get in debt if they
got just a fine. This is where community service comes in, since if you are either rich or poor
you are forced to do the same amount of work which wastes you time and requires effort
giving it a higher impact on an individual, especially on the short term due to the
aforementioned reasons in the hopes of teaching them a lesson.
On the subject of lessons learned, often times the stigma from the society that comes
with this kind of punishment may deter you from breaking the law again. This is especially
true when compared to fines, where mostly no one bats and eye at them and they are viewed
as a common event. However, community work doesn’t benefit from this treatment, which
actually helps with its effectiveness since some people hate the feeling of belittling from the
others and, in consequence, will most likely be staying on the good side of the law further on.
In the end, I have to fully agree with the statement as per the reasons stated above.
While fines certainly have their place and can be effective especially on the lower income
part of a society, community service serves all income parts equally and deters the rich from
acting like money can bail them out every time.