A British supermodel’s five-day stint mopping floors and scrubbing windows at a Lower East Side sanitation garage this week highlights a form of punishment that may be harsher for the rich and famous than for ordinary New Yorkers.

After pleading guilty last January to pummeling her assistant with her cell phone following a spat over a missing pair of blue jeans, supermodel Naomi Campbell, 36, was sentenced to five days of community service in New York City, where she resides in an Upper East Side apartment.

As Ms. Campbell changed back into her stiletto heels from her work boots yesterday, with four more days of unskilled manual labor looming, lawyers and public officials said that for high-profile people, community service becomes as much about public humiliation as it is about rehabilitation.

“There’s an element of shame involved,” a former parks commissioner under Mayors Koch and Giuliani who played a key role in implementing community service sentencing in the 1980s, Henry Stern, said.

“It’s exposure. The idea that they have to be with ordinary people when these celebrities live in their own world — community service is a great comedown,” he said, touting manual labor as a great equalizer. “A fine is rarely an exact measure of justice. To the rich, it’s nothing, and to the poor, it’s everything. A fine for Campbell would be less than what she pays her lawyers.”

Most of the 20,000 lawbreakers every year who are sentenced to community service must perform just a few days of manual labor wherever they are assigned by the district attorney’s office, the chief assistant to the Manhattan district attorney, James Kindler, said. They most often pick up trash in subway stations and parks, participate in graffiti removal, work in soup kitchens, and clean sanitation facilities.

“It’s a penalty,” Mr. Kindler said.

While it may seem insulting to sanitation workers that their profession is served up as punishment for celebrities, Mr. Kindler said calling it a penalty is not meant to demean their careers. For those people assigned to community service, “it’s not their job that they’re doing — it’s an extra job.”

Mr. Stern called the community service completed under his watch as parks commissioner “modestly helpful” to the city, and even useful when it was performed under a high level of supervision.

Ms. Campbell, who is working without the company of handlers and hangers-on, is spending this week indoors at a garage, where she will clean floors and scrub windows.

“It’s a penalty that presumably is good for the city, when jail isn’t appropriate,” Mr. Kindler said.

“Ms. Campbell came prepared to work,” a spokesman for the Department of Sanitation, Keith Mellis, said after escorting her into the facility. The presence of an inexperienced sanitation worker such as Ms. Campbell working with professionals did not slow down the pace of work, he said.

“She has to perform,” Mr. Mellis said. “It doesn’t throw our operation off in any way because community service is something the department already has set in place.”