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The purpose of this paper is to find out who in the white-collar offender field, specifically health-care professionals, is getting community service as a punishment and to lead the way for further research on community service as a legal sanction.

This study collected its sample using Medicaid Fraud Reports from the National Association of Medicaid Fraud Control Units for 2009-2014. In total, 200 reports were used; 100 with community service given as a legal sanction, and 100 without. All the information was then coded by a set of criteria and put into an SPSS Statistics file for analysis.

The findings showed that there was no significant relationship between gender and any of the main legal sanctions looked for in the Medicaid Fraud Reports, except for community service. Community service also had a significant relationship with those offenders who committed physical crimes rather than financial crimes. Last, women were given less severe sanctions on average for all of the major sanctions given.

One of the implications found was that a lot more women were given community service than men. This could be because women are considered homemakers for families, and the court systems do not want to punish a woman in a way that would take her away from her family. It could also be because the court system does not see a reason to punish women as harshly as it may be felt that a woman will learn her lesson with any punishment.

There is very little research done on community service as a sanction. This research helps bring that to light.

This chapter provides a brief overview of community sanctions in Australia and examines the extent to which McNeill’s analysis in Pervasive Punishment (2019) is applicable in the Australian context. Two key issues in the Australian context are, firstly, state and territory-level variations within a federal political structure, and secondly, disproportionate Indigenous imprisonment and community sanction rates and the generally destructive impact of the criminal legal system on Indigenous communities and peoples. The chapter argues that developing a better agonistic politics around community sanctions requires descending from the broad level of historical and sociological analysis to examine state and territory-level variations in judicial and correctional structures, histories and cultures. Further, that Australian community sanctions cannot be understood without a primary focus on the differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous rates, experiences and meaning. The key to addressing the destructive impact of criminal legal processes and practices on Indigenous peoples lies in developing Indigenous governance, empowerment, self-determination, sovereignty and nation-building. Two recent developments promoting Indigenous governance are examined: the Uluru Statement from the Heart and Justice Reinvestment projects initiated by First Nations communities, highlighting the importance of activism, contest and struggle by community organisations.

In this chapter, I analyse the implementation of the reform to the regimen of alternatives to prison in Chile which occurred in 2013 and how the reform affected how punishment is conceived and translated into practice by professionals supervising probation and community services. The findings suggest the reform that led to the new ‘substitutive sanctions’ also introduced a new risk-oriented-managerial culture that has permeated how punishment is currently enforced and envisaged by supervision professionals; a situation that has been deepening over the years, not only through practice, but also via on-going training that has helped to generate the emergence of ‘cultural’ capital that distinguishes supervision professionals from the larger organisation. This has been combined with a rapid expansion in the use of substitutive sanctions, especially probation and ‘partial reclusion’ that can aptly be analysed under the ‘mass supervision’ premise.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact paths of the social capital and the effects of microfinance in rural China, and address effective methods to enhance the effects of microfinance for rural China.

Using a structural equation model with survey data from 350 rural households in China, this paper analyzes empirically whether greater level of social sanctions and social relations caused more tangible effects of microfinance, and whether tangible effects of microfinance are associated with social capital formation of households.

The results indicate that social capital promotes the effects of microfinance and the process of providing microfinance service is also the process of building social capital. Moreover, social sanctions diminish the effects of microfinance while social relations boost them and enhance the effects of microfinance that can encourage social capital formation. Results also show that a reverse causal relationship exists between social sanctions and social relations.

The empirical results imply that actively utilizing and creating social capital is vital to improve the effects of microfinance, and microfinance institutions (MFIs) should concentrate more on harmonious social relations and deliberately build social capital.

These findings imply that actively utilizing and creating social capital is vital to improve the effects of microfinance, and the MFIs should concentrate more on harmonious social relations and deliberately build social capital to enhance the effects of microfinance while prudently use social sanctions.

Enhancing the effects of microfinance, while prudently using social sanctions, increases households income.

This paper originates to investigate the links between the social capital and the effects of microfinance in a mutual way, and the results urge more attentions on the harmonious social relations which have been ignored to enhance the effects of microfinance.

The Scandinavian penal exceptionalism literature has focused largely on imprisonment but has yet to explore other aspects of the penal field in detail. This chapter provides an overview of the penal field in Norway and how community sanctions and measures have evolved within it. The author uses the work of Wacquant and Bourdieu to argue that there are three important levels within the Norwegian penal field: political, policy and practice. The author also discusses how drivers from the political and policy levels are affecting community-based penal practice. Using McNeill’s dimensions of mass supervision, the author discusses the implications of these changes for three less-explored aspects of punishment in Norway: the serving of short sentences at home on electronic monitoring, supervision of people under 18 and ‘punishment debt’ enforcement.