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Resort to civil measures for dealing with harms and potential harms is now common. This chapter examines, in particular, civil preventive orders which are coercive and maps the range of civil preventive orders now in use. It focuses particularly on the best known of these, the Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO), and the measures that will replace it. The chapter examines the rationales for introducing these civil preventive orders into English law, and raises a number of objections to the legal form, use of civil procedure, breadth, proportionality, and application of the civil preventive order, as well as to the punitive sanctions applicable for breach of the order. The chapter goes on to formulate restraining principles for civil preventive orders.

This chapter provides a detailed analysis of the case law governing the imposition of an Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO). It demonstrates first that the grounds for imposing an order are defined as any conduct that manifests a disposition that fails to reassure others about their security; and second that a finding of liability to an order is best understood as the exercise of a power in administrative law to make a risk assessment and preventive order rather than to impose a punishment. This analysis is deployed to critique the theory that the ASBO is a punishment for morally offensive behaviour.

This chapter considers what is distinctive about the Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) by comparing it with Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986. It shows that the ASBO penalizes not individual acts that fail to reassure but any manifestation of a disposition to do so by showing that the ASBO imposes a subtle positive obligation of active citizenship and marks those who fail to fulfil this obligation as a second-class citizen by the reduction of their civil rights; by reviewing the controversy over the ASBO's procedure in order to demonstrate that the ASBO protects a right to freedom from fear; by demonstrating that the Coalition government's proposed reforms to the ASBO impose the same substantive liability as an ASBO; and also by explaining why the ASBO's protection of freedom from fear can be described as a right to security.

This text, which is about the anti-social behaviour (ASB) phenomenon in the United Kingdom, aims to capture, in a single volume, a wide range of positions that one might take up in respect of the ‘anti-social behaviour question’. The chapters chart the first emergence of the issue, the differing interpretations of ASB and contrasting reactions to it. The book includes a selection of the emerging research evidence about ASB and the impact of research findings on policy making. In this, then, the book embraces a broad debate about the contemporary significance of ASB and what could, or should, be done about it. Accordingly, contributions in this book were solicited from a wide variety of authors representing a range of agencies, interests, and perspectives surrounding the ASB issue. The Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) rapidly came to be seen as a specific response to youth problems and ASB. This book also tackles the politics of law and order, the cultural politics of ASB, and issues about communities, social capital, respect and tolerance.

The United Kingdom's Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) was enacted by the UK Parliament in the Crime and Disorder Act of 1998. It provided local authorities and police forces with a sweeping power to control behavior. This chapter explores the specific elements of continuity and change in police power that are to be found in relation to the ASBO. As a power of social control, the ASBO stands in a functional position adjacent to and overlapping with that occupied for more than a millennium by another legal power, latterly known as the bind over. But the ASBO's substantive terms and explicit rationale are quite different from that of the ancient power. The chapter explores these differences and considers their implications for the “new science of police”.

Under New Labour, the problem of anti-social behaviour (ASB) has become, and continues to be, a central policy issue in the United Kingdom. The introduction of a raft of new legislation to deal with this social problem has seen the creation of a variety of behaviour regulation instruments ranging from night curfews to the Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO). However, alongside these new sanctions, one target group of such interventions is distinctly familiar: troublesome young people. This chapter summarises the findings of an Economic and Social Research Council-funded exploratory pilot study that was undertaken in 2005 and draws upon in-depth interviews with two youths (both subject to ASBOs) in one locality. The interviews sought to explore the perception and impact of various ASB interventions upon the respondents. The chapter also considers the Intensive Supervision and Surveillance Programme for persistent young offenders and concludes by advocating the importance of both acknowledging and listening to the ‘anti-social youth perpetrator perspective’ for the purposes of more holistic understandings of ASB and the impact and consequences of its regulation.

This chapter provides detailed analysis of the case law on the criminal offence of breach of an Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO). It demonstrates first, that the offence converts the conduct manifesting the unreassuring disposition that grounds liability to an ASBO from a threat to be controlled by a court order into a public wrong to be punished; and, second, that the penal wrong that the offence defines is, therefore, a wrong of dangerousness. This analysis is deployed to critique the theory that breach of ASBO is a criminal offence that serves to composite many minor offences for the purposes of punishment.

New Labour's ‘tough on crime’ mantra heralded the introduction of a range of criminal justice policies intended to turn this into a reality, a tendency that has brought new instruments of punishment and control every year since 1997. The earliest and still the most controversial was the introduction of the Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) in the Crime and Disorder Act of 1998. The measure immediately attracted criticism for its legal form and for its potentially punitive reach. It stands at one end of a punitive spectrum that ranges through to a huge increase in imprisonment and indeterminate sentences that occurred under the Blair administration. In designing the instrument that was originally called the ‘community safety order’, the Labour government was determined to bypass the prosecution process that it considered ineffective in dealing with persistent neighbourhood nuisance, and at the same time to bind alleged perpetrators with tailor-made restrictions enforced by threat of punishment.

In the ten years of New Labour under Tony Blair, law and order policy in the United Kingdom was characterised by radical extensions of summary powers to police and local authorities to ‘take on the wrongdoers’ and to tackle ‘anti-social behaviour’. The Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) was the flagship measure of this aggressive law and order policy, and the UK was then in the grip of what has been described as ‘Asbomania’. This approach to law and order was founded on the view that traditional criminal justice values, born in this country, exported around the world — equality of arms, the presumption of innocence and the proportionate and dispassionate meting out of punishment by the state, those values that preceded the post-war universal human rights consensus and became so central to it — simply will not do. They are neither fundamental and inalienable nor even potentially expendable. Instead, their disposal is a matter of social duty and considerable urgency.

This book has tackled the full spectrum of advocacy, opinion, commentary, research evidence and findings, professional practice and development, debate and critique surrounding anti-social behaviour (ASB) in the United Kingdom — in short, everything it was possible to say about ASB management and ‘the Anti-Social Behaviour Order’, in particular. It has considered the broad debate about the contemporary significance of ASB: what could, or should, be done about it and, indeed, what was being done about it and, not least, how effective this was proving to be. The point has been made in the introduction, and by a number of commentators in the book, about the fast-moving field of law and order politics in the UK. This has been especially noticeable with regard to ASB policy, an issue on which Tony Blair placed so much emphasis. The questions we need to ask of ASB management concern whether the pre-emptive criminalisation of relatively marginal young people, already the victims of social and economic processes beyond their control, offers a plausible contribution to social justice.

Chapter 24 dealt with the range of custodial penalties at the court’s disposal. The great majority of offenders, however, are dealt with by some means other than custody, and this Chapter is concerned with the non-custodial options.

The promotion of respect in society, like the concern about anti-social behaviour, engages with issues that on the one hand are relatively small or insignificant — dropping litter or not saying ‘thank you’, for example. The ‘ASBO (Anti-Social Behaviour Order) agenda’ in the United Kingdom has been criticised for its authoritarian dynamic — especially by those on the left. However, even for critics there appears to be an uncertainty about the nature of behaviour today and a certain sense that there are some real problems to be addressed. Some, for example, believe that we are living in a ‘culture of greed’ — a belief that raises questions not only about capitalism and consumerism, but also about the very nature of relationships between people — indeed about the nature of people themselves. This chapter argues that there are some new problems to address today, but that the problem we face is ultimately not one of an anti-social society but of an asocial society. It looks at Tony Blair's ‘Respect Agenda’ and the politics of behaviour, along with the so-called therapeutic me.