Conscription in The United States - Civilian Service

Civilian Service

Conscription has been used nationally only to provide men to the military. The most common form of compulsory civilian service in the U.S. is the much shorter obligation of jury duty for adults—however for minors, compulsory education is a form of conscription that not only affects only minors from the age of five years and up, but lasts up to twelve years, with ten years being the average requirement.

Mandatory public service of a non-military nature is likewise required as part of the high school curriculum in many school districts across the nation. Since 1992, the state of Maryland has required a total of 75 hours of "developmentally appropriate service-learning activities" over the course of grades 6 through 12. Each county in the state of Maryland makes its own requirement for the amount of community service a student has to complete to graduate from high school.

Mandatory full-time service on a national scale has been proposed many times and was backed by, for example, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Recent proposals have been modeled after the Americorps program, but necessarily much larger in scale when made mandatory. Robert Litan of the Brookings Institution estimates the cost for a program of one year for all high school graduates at $25 billion.