COMMENTARY
Bruce Andriatch: Community service given a fresh twist
As a lawyer and a Clarence town justice, Michael Powers has said or heard the term “community service” thousands of times. But only very recently did he begin to think about what it meant.
Once he did, he decided to do something to put the community back in community service.
Powers has begun taking steps to see that criminals convicted in Town Court and sentenced to community service do something to benefit Clarence directly.
Until now, community service sentences were the purview of the Erie County Probation Department, which handles the defendants and makes sure they carry out the sentence.
Powers said he had no complaint with that system, until he noticed that not one agency or organization in his town benefited from community service.
“I thought, ‘The crimes were committed in the town. The damages, whatever they were, were done to the town. And the cost of addressing those problems and the criminal-justice aspect of those problems are all expenses that were borne by the town,’ ” Powers said last week. “So it struck me that the community service ought to benefit the town.”
Rachelle Cybulski, acting director of the Erie County Probation Department, said that if Clarence goes ahead with Powers’ idea, she believes that it will be the first town in the county to do so. She said the idea “makes perfectly good sense.”
Powers has been making a lot of sense since he began serving as town justice last June. He started a drug court and a domestic-violence court, both fairly common elsewhere but new to Clarence. And when he noticed that people he sent to driving school for vehicle and traffic infractions had to go somewhere other than Clarence, he helped bring a driving school to the town. None are exactly earth-shattering ideas, but as Powers said: “Sometimes things are so obvious that you don’t see them.”
The new approach to community service seems to fall under that category.
After finding out from his court clerk that none of his sentences for community service were served in Clarence, Powers contacted fellow Justice Robert Sillars and the town departments and agencies that he thought would be receptive to his idea. They were.
Powers hopes that defendants are able to pick up the slack when volunteers are needed—such as cleanup after an outdoor festival—or to fill a role that would otherwise require hiring town employees.
The town’s animal-control officer might be the first beneficiary. Clarence wants to conduct an animal census but doesn’t have the employees to carry it out. Powers sees that as a perfect community service sentence.
It should be pointed out that nothing worse than a Class A misdemeanor can be adjudicated in Clarence Town Court, meaning that justices generally handle crimes such as petit larceny, underage drinking and marijuana possession. Sentences would be tailored to the crime and the criminal, Powers said, meaning that residents need not worry that he or Sillars would sentence a public-lewdness defendant to work at the youth center.
A potential drawback to the Powers plan is that if other towns follow suit, agencies that rely on community service could suffer. That’s a reason to be judicious, not a reason to not try it.
New ideas are hard to come by around here, often because of the drumbeat of people saying that’s not the way it’s done. But as Cybulski said of Powers’ idea: “Just because it has been done one way the past 25 years, it’s not necessarily always the best thing.”
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