New ASBOs for old?
| DOI | 10.1177/0022018315596706 |
| Published date | 01 August 2015 |
| Date | 01 August 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
New ASBOs for old?
Phil Edwards
Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK
Abstract
The Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) was designed as a civil/criminal hybrid, preventive in
structure and with a largely undefined object. After 2002, legal challenges to the ASBO led to
the use of justificatory arguments from cumulative effect, and to the introduction of new
measures which offered to regulate anti-social behaviour in more legally acceptable forms. In
2014 the Coalition government replaced the ASBO with two new instruments: a post-
conviction Criminal Behaviour Order (CBO) and a wholly-civil anti-social behaviour injunc-
tion (ASB Injunction). While the CBO and the ASB Injunction build on this history, it is argued
that they do not represent a new approach to anti-social behaviour so much as a continuation
of the ASBO by other means.
Keywords
Anti-social behaviour, ASBO, behaviour regulation, chronic crime, harassment
In creating the ASBO, the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 empowered a magistrate to impose a range of
prohibitions, requested by a police officer or local authority representative, on an individual who had
engaged in an undefined range of behaviours which had either caused or had the potential to cause
offence. These prohibitions did not address the offending behaviour directly but were designed to pre-
vent the opportunity for offensive behaviour from arising. Any breach of the prohibitions was a criminal
offence, potentially attracting a substantial custodial sentence, irrespective of whether the offensive
behaviour itself had been repeated. These three characteristics—the undefined nature of anti-social
behaviour; the combination of civil and criminal law used to address it; and the preventive regulatory
structure of the ASBO—were novel individually; taken together they presented legal and logical chal-
lenges, whose working-out dominates the history of the ASBO.
The undefined nature of anti-social behaviour, first, was emphasised in parliamentary debates on
what would be the Crime and Disorder Act 1998: Home Office minister Alun Michael insisted on a loose
definition, arguing that ‘[a] narrower formulation would permit the defendant to circumvent the order by
subtly changing the anti-social activity in question’.
1
Under the terms of the Act, an ASBO could be
Corresponding author:
Phil Edwards, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester M15 6BH, UK.
E-mail: p.j.edwards@mmu.ac.uk
1. SC Deb (B) 30 April 1998.
The Journal of Criminal Law
2015, Vol. 79(4) 257–269
ªThe Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0022018315596706
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