Driving home a couple of days ago I was indulging in my usual irritating habit of cruising radio stations when I was captivated by a woman journalist talking on Absolute radio.  Normally I flick stations to indulge in rock music and avoid the talking as it is usually mundane, the exception being the blessed Radio 4 of course.  She was apparently doing a regular feature called “Unbroken Britain” and was reporting on a trip she had made to the West End to search for drunken women on a Friday night,  as she said the tabloids appear to be obsessed with them.  She couldn’t find any and even resorted to asking random women to come and get drunk with her.  She then phoned the Sun and told them there was a drunk woman in the street, but she said their interest increased significantly when she said the woman was young with long bare legs.  Indeed, it seems that almost all the drunken women photographed in the tabloids have long elegant bare legs.  Interesting that a commercial radio station is trying to counter media hysteria.

Secondly, I would like to support Sir David Latham’s critique that we can’t create a world free of risk (see today’s Guardian front page).  The parole board has been under huge and unacceptable pressure from politicians and the consequence is, as Latham points out, that there are real injustices when people don’t get parole.  There are now many thousands of men, women and children languishing in jails for years past their expected release date, stuck in a modern version of limbo.  The parole board needs to be properly resourced, given appropriate legal structures that ensure its independence, and left alone to get on with the job.

Finally, I remember the riots in Strangeways and 20 other prisons very clearly.  But I must admit to being shocked at the vengefulness of the system against those who rioted to protest their treatment.  They got long additional prison sentences so that even now some are still behind bars.  I know that some of the men were ghosted round the prisons for years, being moved every 28 days, often in the night without knowing where they were going.  Their families were not told where they were. This was one of the informal punishments inflicted on them as revenge.  We should remember that two decades ago brutality against prisoners was rife. Staff would return to the big local prisons after a long lunch having imbibed several pints and batter the hell out of inmates, particularly troublesome or black prisoners.  This does not happen now, and we should celebrate the improvement, but remember that prisons still infantilise and demean individuals, and contribute to crime through appalling reoffending rates.

And on that cheery note, have a happy holiday everyone.

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I was talking to two very senior former aides to Labour cabinet ministers this week. Apparently early on in the Labour government there were several full cabinet discussions about anti-social behaviour. Labour MPs, and cabinet ministers, traditionally represent inner city constituencies with a high proportion of social housing and, often, large council estates. Thirty years ago social housing allowed for mobility. One of the consequences of selling off council homes was that the best went and the only social housing left to local authorities now are tower blocks and estates that only the very poor will accept from sheer desperation. I was an elected councillor in an outer London borough in the 1980s, and when I first sat on the council we owned 15,000 homes; when I stood down in 1990 we had only 10,000 left, and they were mostly flats as the houses had been sold. The consequence of this was the concentration of the very poor and families with problems onto small areas, they have been effectively corralled.

The surgeries of Labour MPs were being flooded with complaints about anti-social behaviour from these areas. Whereas before families with problems were dispersed and moved around, by the late 1990s they were grouped and other people trapped next to them – the elderly and poor – started to complain.

The aides told me that the civil servants didn’t get it. They didn’t understand what anti-social behaviour was. These top civil servants lived in areas where there weren’t the housing stresses that the Labour MPs encountered in their surgeries (and neither did Conservative MPs which is why it had not been a political issue during the previous administration). Special seminars had to be held to inform the senior civil servants about anti-social behaviour.

So the whole political stampede on anti-social behaviour was started. 

The consequences have been disastrous. On the BBC news today there is a report that 20,000 children have been subjected to electronic tagging. 15,000 anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs) have been issued and about half are breached. Although a civil order, a breach can trigger criminal proceedings and even custody. Many of the people subjected to ASBOs have a range of intractable problems, from drug addiction to mental health problems and the order does not come with help, only imprecations. 

I don’t think it is a coincidence that the number of women sentenced to prison for very short periods of time increased last year by nearly 1,000. They are exactly the sort of women who have not committed serious or violent crimes, but who have chaotic lives and are involved in repeat nuisance offending, for example, shoplifting to feed a heroin addiction.

The focus on punishment and civil orders to control what is undoubtedly a real issue has been one of the great failures of the Labour government. It has not contributed towards a safer society but has wasted huge sums of public money that could have been invested in services to prevent the nuisance. No one is denying that anti-social behaviour needs a response, but I contend that wagging the finger at a drug addict is pretty ineffective, especially when wagging that finger only leads to Pentonville or Holloway.

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