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This has been an exploratory study of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) in the United Kingdom based on a selective sample of offenders, agencies, victims and residents. It became evident in the course of the research that these different groups tended to employ different criteria of ‘success’ in relation to the use of ASBOs. Assessments of success tended to be made on a number of dimensions: bringing relief to certain neighbourhoods and groups; reducing the level and impact of anti-social behaviour (ASB); changing attitudes and motivation of offenders; level of breaches and their enforcement; reduction of different forms of ASB in the area.

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 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.

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 chapter summarises the findings of the research which explored the operation, views and experiences of the relevant agencies in selecting and processing cases of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) in the United Kingdom. It analyses both the conceptual and practical issues that have arisen in different locations and in different agencies. The findings are discussed under the following headings: variations in attitudes and experience in different boroughs; interagency partnership and cooperation; criteria for selecting and processing cases; the problem of definition; the shift from ASBOs to Anti-Social Behaviour Orders on Conviction; formulating the conditions for ASBOs; the provision of support and welfare services; the use of ASBOs in relation to Acceptable Behaviour Contracts and Parenting Orders; and breaches and enforcement.

This chapter summarises the findings of the research which assessed the impact of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) on a range of offenders in the United Kingdom, particularly in relation to their propensity to engage in anti-social behaviour and future offending. The frequency with which orders were breached was also investigated, as well as the impact of the order on the offender's personal life, including their personal and family relationships. This chapter draws on information gathered from the 38 completed cases and the 28 additional offender interviews that were undertaken. It discusses the findings under the following topics: offending histories; social, personal and psychological histories; attitudes towards being given an ASBO; responses to the conditions of the order; impact of ASBOs on offenders; geographic and functional displacement; number and type of breaches; and impact on personal, social and family life.

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.

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.

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 approaches the issue of addressing anti-social behaviour (ASB) in the United Kingdom from the perspective of practitioners and policy makers operating at a local level. It focuses on three aspects: practice and policy as applied in one local authority area (Leeds); the key issues for practitioners around the country (as identified by research undertaken by the National Community Safety Network); and new moves to address the causes, as well as the symptoms, of ASB (the government's Respect Agenda and the Positive Approaches group). The first section examines the strategic approach to ASB adopted in Leeds and the establishment and operation of policies and interventions to address ASB through a dedicated unit and multi-agency problem-solving panels. It describes the experiment in multiple Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) of Operation Cape and its mutation into smaller, rolling multi-agency programmes. The second section examines the findings of the National Community Safety Network's research. The third section looks at the proposals coming out of the Positive Approaches alliance.

This book summarises the findings of a study that explored Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) in the United Kingdom and the views and experiences of the three key parties involved — the agencies, the offenders and the victims. It looks at the implementation of ASBOs and their impact on the different types of offenders. It examines the role of the agencies involved in processing and issuing ASBOs; the impact on those given ASBOs, particularly in relation to their propensity to engage in anti-social and criminal behaviour; and the experience and concerns of victims, complainants and affected communities. The research was conducted in seven London boroughs, and one location in the Midlands. Twenty-nine interviews were conducted with practitioners, including police, anti-social behaviour officers, community safety officers, housing officers, Youth Offending Team members, probation officers and magistrates.

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.

Chapter 4 examines deserters and absentees who unleashed waves of crime and violence in Mississippi, as well as soldiers and civilians who requested military exemptions under the pretence that they could better serve the Confederacy in a civilian capacity. Despite scholarly claims that Confederates deserted to protect hearth and home, Mississippians clearly distinguished home from nation. This chapter connects desertion to banditry that harked back to the Revolutionary War, when wartime chaos drove detached military units to embrace opportunistic collective violence and commit criminal acts. The collapse of Mississippi’s social order spurred Confederate deserters to engage in opportunistic collective violence sustained by pre-existing group loyalties. Yet the war also created new gang loyalties, which expanded outside of partisan boxes. Soldiers also demonstrated the importance of pre-war attachments through shirking, absenteeism, and exemptions, which civilians encouraged and supported.

This chapter places the use of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) in policing prostitution into the broader context of the regulation of prostitution in the United Kingdom. It argues that ASBOs are not at odds with recent reforms to the regulation of prostitution — despite first impressions — and are not particularly innovative or new measures used by criminal justice agencies in the policing and regulation of prostitution. It also contends that ASBOs represent a broader shift in the way prostitution is regulated towards harsher, deeper, targeted state-sponsored, coercive and punitive regulation of some of the most excluded, marginalised and impoverished individuals in prostitution — street sex workers. First, the chapter places ASBOs in the context of the regulatory system as put in place by the Wolfenden Report and which has been in operation for the last sixty years. It then considers the recommendations set out in the Coordinated Strategy. The Wolfenden Committee recommended the decriminalisation of male homosexuality and the partial criminalisation of prostitution.

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”.

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.

In order to find out how different community groups and victims in the United Kingdom felt about the effectiveness of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs), seven focus groups were conducted in communities that had been affected by high levels of anti-social behaviour (ASB) and where ASBOs had been used. One of the focus groups was not directly related to specific ASBO cases, but was included in the survey to provide some insight into the attitudes of residents towards ASBOs in locations not directly affected by ASB. Fourteen in-depth interviews with victims and complainants were also carried out. Each victim interview directly corresponds to one or more of the 38 ASBO cases. This chapter summarises the findings, focusing on community expectations and changing levels of tolerance; problems with evidence, intimidation and enforcement; issues of displacement; concern for the vulnerable and marginalised; and competing priorities.