‘Temporary relief for specially recommended or selected deserving persons’: the mission of the House of Charity, Soho, 1846–1914

ABSTRACT:Twentieth-century voluntary social work organizations became accustomed to altering the emphases of their work in response to changing legislation or shifts in funding priorities. The House of Charity for Distressed Persons in Soho, founded in 1846, provides a nineteenth-century example of a similar phenomenon. The history of its first 70 years suggests that the intention to serve ‘selected deserving persons’ was outweighed by the need to ensure the spiritual well-being of its benefactors through opportunities for Christian service. Its primary purpose was thereby subverted, and the energies of its workers were diverted from raising funds to support ‘selected deserving persons’ to casting round for ways to fill the space in the House and to continue to give the benefactors a role.

The ‘Correction’ of Community Crime Control: A Legal-Pluralist Interpretation

The New Zealand Corrections Division has historically used the voluntary social work sector as a means of regulating criminality ‘at a distance’. Shifts in the modes through which the Division has related to the voluntary sector are analyzed here using Santos' form of legal-pluralist theory. That theory suggests that innovative forms of legal regulation are created when divergent modes of law interpenetrate one another. These new modes of legal power then attempt to regulate sociality by constructing the subjectivity of those with which they interact. This article suggests that the Corrections Division is itself characterised by dual forms of subjectivity, namely communitarian and proceduralist. The tension between these has become evident as the Division has sought to inculcate a proceduralist subjectivity within the voluntary sector, so as to construct voluntary sector agencies as self-regulating subjects. The tension exists between the Division's need to use the voluntary sector as a means by which it can regulate criminality, and to construct and respect that sector as an autonomous entity. Moreover, the imposition of a proceduralist subjectivity, because it is an imposition, has the potential to diminish the ability of those agencies to control crime and/or to critique its social construction.