The consequences of a political stampede on anti-social behaviour

The Guardian has a front page story today based on an ICM poll of voting intentions that the Conservative lead is down to 9 points over Labour. So the outcome of the general election is looking a lot less certain than in recent months. We could have a hung parliament, or a slim Labour lead or a Conservative victory. What would this mean for the penal system? 

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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December 15, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Government policy, Sentencing, Women in custody, anti-social behaviour

2 Responses

  1. Finlay Richardson - May 18, 2010

    Drug Addiction will not only ruin your body but it would also mess up your life.:-~

  2. Zachary Evans - July 19, 2010

    drug addiction is really a very bad problem of the society, it destroys the life of a person:”*

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