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Thomas Holmes served for 20 years as a police court missionary for the London courts. Police court missionaries, often sponsored by temperance unions, were the predecessors to today’s probation officers. Their role was to get convicted criminals back on the straight and narrow, and to help them stay there. In his years in this job, Holmes got a very close look at the causes of crime, and to the difficulty people had in staying back out of the courts once in the system. Chief among the causes he observed were alcoholism (what was then called dipsomania), poverty, and domestic violence. In this book, originally published in 1900, Holmes tells real-life stories of the people he encountered in the system and the beliefs about crime he developed as a result. Well over a century later, many of the issues still sound familiar. - Summary by Verla Viera