The Mission to the English Police Courts 1876–1936

This essay explores the efforts of the Police Court Mission in the courts of summary jurisdiction. For 60 years, in an age which accorded ever‐increasing importance to the methods of science, the missionaries held firmly to a religious philosophy, distinctively their own. This paper attempts to explain how it was possible for the missionaries to be absorbed into the probation system, and for their religious ideals to yield, eventually, to the radically different philosophy of the aspiring, “scientific” social work diagnosticians.