I’ve drafted an article about how some nonprofits and probation officers are allowing people who are court-ordered to do community service to pay a fee or make a donation as a substitute for actually volunteering. But I’d like to ask for feedback on one part of the paper.

I wanted a list of some of the consequences of this practice of allowing court-ordered volunteers to make a donation instead of actually doing service. But I have just three points:

• People becoming skeptical that community service is actually being done and believing those that receive court-ordered community service are getting “an easy way out” of real consequences for their actions.
• Inequity, as some people still have to do actual community service because they cannot afford to make a financial donation, and the donation being asked for is often less than the fine the court issued and offered to waive in return for community service.
• In the case of nonprofits offering legitimate online community service, a growing belief that virtual volunteering is merely someone watching videos or producing text that is supposedly their self-reflections – something that could easily be generated in seconds by artificial intelligence – which undermines the credibility of actual virtual volunteering, such as transcribing scanned, hand-written historical documents, redesigning web sites to that they are accessible for people with disabilities, correcting captions on videos, etc.

Are there more consequences of allowing this practice? I would love your thoughts. Please know that, in sharing them here, I might include them in the final paper, though I won’t be identifying contributors, unless I have the contributor’s permission to do so and feel that it’s necessary (such as for quotes).

Here are all my blogs to date regarding some aspect of court-ordered community service.