In England and Wales, courts can order offenders to carry out reparative, unpaid work in their communities called "Community Payback." Community payback is designed to demonstrate that those who have caused harm to a community are visibly repaying their debt. This paper identifies nine key principles for effective community payback. This paper also relates the New York experience of opening out the delivery of community payback to non-State providers. This study replicates and adds to the model already being used in England and Wales. Findings suggest providers and commissioners need to work closely together to develop the community payback service they want, the New York experience was iterative and experimental. Both commissioner and provider should be committed to a particular vision of what payback can be, such as visible reparation by offenders that demonstrate that the justice system responds to specific, local community concerns. Measuring the value that community payback provides neighborhoods can be an inexact science and annual quantitative performance measurement and unit costs, while vital, will only tell a partial story. The New York experience suggests that trying to get an understanding of the qualitative differences can be just as important for purchasers as hard numbers. 18 endnotes