Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Introduction: why ‘anti-social behaviour’? Debating ASBOs
- Part One Managing anti-social behaviour: priorities and approaches
- Part Two Anti-social behaviour management: emerging issues
- Part Three Anti-social behaviour case studies: particular social groups affected by anti-social behaviour policies
- Part Four Anti-ASBO: criticising the ASBO industry
seventeen - ‘ASBOmania’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 January 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Introduction: why ‘anti-social behaviour’? Debating ASBOs
- Part One Managing anti-social behaviour: priorities and approaches
- Part Two Anti-social behaviour management: emerging issues
- Part Three Anti-social behaviour case studies: particular social groups affected by anti-social behaviour policies
- Part Four Anti-ASBO: criticising the ASBO industry
Summary
For eight years I have battered the criminal justice system to get it to change. And it was only when we started to introduce special anti-social behaviour laws, we made a real difference. And now I understand why. The system itself is the problem. We are trying to fight 21st century crime – anti-social behaviour, drug dealing, binge drinking, organised crime – with 19th century methods, as if we still lived in the time of Dickens. The whole of our system starts from the proposition that its duty is to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. Don't misunderstand me. That must be the duty of any criminal justice system. But surely our primary duty should be to allow law-abiding people to live in safety. It doesn't mean abandoning human rights. It means deciding whose come first. (Blair, 2005)
Tony Blair's meteoric career is well documented. His most significant brief before ascending to the leadership of his party, and then the country, was that of Home Secretary Michael Howard's shadow. It was then that the famous ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ slogan was first coined. It was then that Mr Blair began developing one of the most significant elements of his phenomenal political success.
New Labour's belief in social justice (as greater equality in opportunities and outcomes is now so often described) would no longer be a bar to aggressive law and order policy. Quite the contrary, it would be the greatest justification for it. All sections of society might fear and loathe crime and nuisance but, the argument went, it was often the poorest and most vulnerable who were most exposed to it. Thus, even that notoriously authoritarian Conservative might be outflanked in a key, vote-winning comfort zone.
In the ten years of New Labour under Tony Blair, law and order policy has been characterised by radical extensions of summary powers to police and local authorities to ‘take on the wrongdoers’ and tackle ‘anti-social behaviour’. Whitehall departments have published documents entitled Delivering simple, speedy, summary justice (DCA, 2006) and Rebalancing the criminal justice system in favour of the law-abiding majority (Home Office, 2006).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- ASBO NationThe Criminalisation of Nuisance, pp. 315 - 326Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2008