Chris Brown Begins Community Service Sentence for Beating of Rihanna

Chris Brown, the 20-year-old R&B singer found guilty on June 22, 2009 of felony assault against his then-girlfriend, popular singer and Jay-Z protégée Rihanna, began serving his 56-week sentence of community service today.

Inside Edition showed a videotape of Chris Brown provided by WWBT (NBC 12) News in which Brown is shown wearing an orange vest with reflector stripes over a plain white tank top and dark jeans. Chris Brown also wears protective work gloves and a red baseball cap and appears to be relaxed, smiling and interacting with other people on his work detail. A large diamond stud winks jauntily from his left ear, because goodness knows it always pays to accessorize properly for your court-ordered landscaping duty.

Brown is shown working industriously, at least in the edited version that we are shown, carrying what looks like a piece of discarded fencing, carrying tree branches and whacking away with a rake at weeds and roadside debris.

So, will Chris Brown be properly rehabilitated by the community service sentence? Instead of landscaping, shouldn't he be working intake at a shelter for battered women, so that he can see the horrifying impact of abuse firsthand? Or is the point of community service more to get the municipal crap work done while giving convicted pop stars a chance to ruminate about what they might end up doing if they were to screw up enough times to fall completely from grace? Is this a more effective deterrent than trying to explain why beating up someone who loves you is terribly, desperately wrong? Maybe it is, to someone who would do such a thing. At any rate, the court has also mandated that Chris Brown attend domestic violence counseling, so maybe this two-pronged course of action will yield worthwhile results.

If Chris Brown decides never to lay hands on a woman again, perhaps it doesn't matter whether he does so out of the realization that you never show love with your fists, or simply from the fear of retribution and punishment. Maybe it's not rehabilitation so much as negative reinforcement. Maybe that's the best we can really do. If we cannot help a failed human being, does that make us a failed society? And is it society's burden to help a person, or is it his own responsibility? Was Chris Brown liable to resort to violence before he became famous, or has his fame given him the idea that whatever he does is okay?

Never mind Chris Brown's fame, Rihanna's fame, or the giant flap that has surrounded the whole situation (and rightly so-it is important to take domestic violence seriously); this boils down to a choice. Do you do the right thing, or not? Even if you can get away with it, if you do the wrong thing, it is a choice. A bad one. Chris Brown, and all of us, have a choice of what to do every single time. Make the right one, and you won't end up on the side of the road in Virginia, whacking weeds with a rake while the news media films you in your day-glo orange ConvictWear, and more importantly, the beautiful, precious woman who loves you won't have to leave you in fear for her life.

Sources: Inside Edition, WWBT, Wikipedia