Community Service: A Progressive Shift

Abstract

This research examines the development of community service as a progressive mode of punishment within India's changing criminal justice system. It evaluates the shift from retributive to reformative and restorative processes with focus on legal incorporation of community service under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, and the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015. The research adopts a convergence of doctrinal strategies reviewing statutory schemes, case laws, and comparative practices alongside survey-based cues of public and legal dispositions. Analytical analysis places front and centre the potential of community service to release overcrowding in prisons, reduce state expenditures, and rehabilitate offenders, while fixing loopholes in legal certainty, implementation, and people's perception. The findings reveal a changing penal consciousness tiptoeing between deterrence and rehabilitation. Finally, the study dwells on the point that well-structured and monitored community service and truly reform India's penal system by including restorative justice and social benefit.