The idea of a generic community sentence first emerged officially in England and Wales in 1988. The first half of this article traces the development of this policy initiative through its various guises, until its introduction in the Criminal Justice Act 2003. The new order, not surprisingly, given its fragmentary development as a policy, is expected to achieve a variety of objectives, many of which move in the direction of a more punitive penal culture. In the second part of the paper, using official statistics, trends in the use of the order are examined and compared with the suspended sentence order. The implications of the results of this analysis for the probation service are discussed.
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