The role that voluntary religious and philanthropic organisations played in the policing of prostitution in Britain during the nineteenth century is relatively well documented, but less is known about the role that these institutions continued to play in the twentieth century. The early twentieth century is often seen as a period characterised by the movement away from philanthropy in favour of a more modern, scientific approach towards social work. However, in Scotland the development of the probation service in close association with voluntary organisations formally enshrined in law a system of regulating prostitution that had previously been more informal. Rather than punishing all women who were accused of prostitution offences with fines and short prison sentences, magistrates in Edinburgh and Glasgow increasingly opted to give some women probation sentences instead. This penal-welfare approach towards the regulation of prostitution therefore relied on and encouraged the close cooperation between the police and magistrates on the one hand and the voluntary organisations involved in probation on the other. However, not all of the women convicted of prostitution were given the option of probation and not all of them necessarily appreciated or complied with this new penal-welfare approach.

The first half of this chapter will outline the ways in which probation sentences were used to police women who committed prostitution offences and examine the close links that existed between the new probation service and voluntary institutions. The second section will look more closely at the daily activities of these voluntary organisations, focusing particularly on the Magdalene Asylums, the Scottish National Vigilance Association (SNVA) and the Women Patrols. These case studies will allow us to examine how the collaborations that were established between these voluntary organisations and the probation service influenced regulation of prostitution and women's experiences of the criminal justice system.

The Probation Service

Chapter two has shown how, rather than attempting to criminalise the women involved in prostitution, the police in early-twentieth-century Scotland were often apathetic or tried to employ a more welfare-oriented approach. One of the most important ways in which this penal-welfare approach was implemented in Scotland during the first half of the twentieth century was through the probation service. In 1907 the Probation of Offenders Act officially introduced probation as an alternative means of rehabilitating people who had committed petty offences.