JUSTICE AND SERVICE
" OUR Report," says the Departmental Committee on the Social Services in Courts of Summary Jurisdiction, appointed by the Home Secretary in 1934, " will draw public attention to the value and growing importance of the social side of the adminis- tration of justice." It would be strange if it did not. The Committee was appointed to enquire into the social services, probation work and methods of conciliation in matrimonial disputes of those Summary Courts more popularly known as Police-Courts, and sometimes referred to as the Poor Man's Courts. In no other courts of justice, perhaps, is it so clear that environment may press a man so hard that he has little or no freedom of choice in his actions, even when he commits crimes. And the Police-Court is the poor man's court of justice where not only crimes but his matrimonial disputes are judged ; in both it is necessary that the administration of justice should have a " social side " if it is to be justice at all. Where marriages are disturbed or ruined by assault, desertion, cruelty, drunkenness, venereal disease, enforced prostitution, the Summary Courts can make orders providing for separation, custody of children and maintenance. It is true that if, in the strange language of lawyers, " a poor person is not worth a sum exceeding £50 . . . or in special circum- stances a sum not exceeding £100," he may apply for assistance in suing or defending as a poor person in a matrimonial dispute in the High Court, but such disputes between poor persons in the High Court are small in number compared with those which come before a Summary Court. "The matrimonial disputes of the poor are in fact for the most part determined by the magistrates."
Thus the matrimonial disputes of the poor come before courts which exercise both civil and criminal jurisdiction. It is not a good combination of functions and in justice there is no basis for it ; it is one of the distinctions between rich and poor created by history, accident and social circumstances. The Committee has had to discover how magistrates who have to condemn a criminal can also be fit judges for an erring husband or wife ; for it considers that, for social and financial reasons, the matrimonial disputes of the poor cannot be transferred to the High Court. It does not recommend that special courts should be set up to settle such disputes ; it proposes rather that the practice of some courts of hearing matri- monial cases at special sessions should be generally adopted. The Bench, to avoid formality, should consist of not more than three. Justices, one a woman. The sessions should be public to Press reporters and all who can show good reason for attending, but not to the merely scandalous and curious. Press reports should be limited to names and addresses, those concerned, statement of charges, defence and counter charges, submissions on points of law, and the decision of the Court. These proposals arc sufficient, iii the Committee's view, to give the Courts' special sessions a privacy and freedom in procedure which will distinguish them from those in which criminal cases are decided.
But perhaps more valuable and significant are the Committee's recommendations on methods of conciliation. In the Committee's view, at present, " there is some risk that applicants may be deprived of their legal remedy," especially when the probation officer, to whom conciliation is entrusted, may be actuated " by personal convictions as to the sanctity of marriage." The Committee points out the large number of cases which never come to the stage of hearing before a court, for the zealous probationer sees his duty in conciliating the dis- putants. Yet, as an experienced witness said to the Committee, very many such cases of conciliation cannot be more than formal and apparent. It may be a conciliation which binds a would-be applicant to " one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe " ; and the Committee shows both courage and wisdom in recognising this danger. It recommends that conciliation should only be attempted after the magistrate has satisfied himself that it is advisable ; but that, the decision made, the actual work of conciliation should be entrusted to the probation officer. But it considers that the time has conic to organise probation work as a public service, in general performed by full-time officers who have received both a general and a special training for their work. It is suggested also that, in eases where disputes arc due to sexual ignorance or inexperience, the probation officer should have the assistance of a qualified and experienced doctor. Thus the Com- mittee has been fully aware of both aspects of the problem it has had to study. It recognises that the Summary Court is, for most poor people, the only means to settling matrimonial difficulties which, in many cases, may well be intolerable, and it has been anxious to preserve full access to this legal remedy; at the same time it wishes to improve and extend the probationary services and it emphasizes the value and necessity of continued co-operation with voluntary societies.
It recommends also that the other social services connected with the Summary Court, such as investiga- tion even where no probation order has been made, enquiries under the Money Payments Act, the giving of advice in applications in bastardy, supervision of juveniles, should be recognised as an. official part of the probationary service. Indeed, the aim of the Committee is clear ; it is to establish the pro- bation officer as an essential and recognised link in the administration of justice, and this aim is fully justified, both by the necessity for a justice sensitive to the social conditions -of crime, and by the immense value of the work already performed by voluntary and salaried probationary workers. The report recognises the curative power of a properly organised system of justice and the added demands made upon that system by modern conditions. But again the committee has not ignored the double aspect of the problem: an amendment it proposes to the Probation of Offenders Act recognises that probation, even though it benefit the offender, is a restriction of liberty, a punishment, and can only follow conviction.
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