Rougher Justice

Peter Squires, Dawn Stephen

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138176409
• eBook ISBN: 9781134043262
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Anti-social behaviour has become a major political preoccupation of government and combating it is now a major plank of criminal justice policy. Yet anti-social behaviour as a concept has been little studied, and the notion has often been accepted uncritically. This book aims to meet this need, providing a critique of the government's use of the concept of anti-social behaviour and of youth justice strategy more generally. Rougher Justice foregrounds the perspectives and experiences of young people themselves. It draws upon recent developments within the field of cultural criminology to provide an alternative interpretation of the construction of 'youthful criminal careers'. It is underpinned by research in three separate areas which focus on the new youth justice, youthful criminal careers, and anti-social behaviour and acceptable behaviour enforcement. Central to the book is an ambition to understand youthful delinquency from the inside and to recover what is lost in much of New Labour's youth justice strategy --and the methods adopted by the Youth Justice Board to evaluate this strategy, that is to say a situated and interpretive understanding of youthful delinquency drawn from the perspective of and in the voices of young people themselves.

Chapter 1

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The new politics of behaviour: anti–social behaviour as a contested terrain

If I am acquainted with my neighbours and have some sort of network close to me, I have an easy time if some youngsters misbehave in my hallway. I can call for someone who might know some of them, or I can turn to the athletic neighbour one floor up — or perhaps better still — I can ask for help from the little lady I know as particularly good at handling local conflicts. But without a network, and with all the information on the increase in crime in mind, I would have locked the door and called the police. I would thereby have created conditions for encouraging unwanted behaviour, and for giving that unwanted behaviour the meaning of crime. (Christie 2004: 69–70)

While undertaking some of the fieldwork discussed in this book we encountered a claim, often promulgated by anti-social behaviour (ASB) enforcers (the new class of social control agents dedicated to the task of policing ASB in some of its contemporary manifestations). The claim was that our recent preoccupation with ASB should be taken as a positive sign. The implication read into this development was that a community’s major crime problems had already been tackled and no longer posed the threat or generated the fears they once did, thereby allowing community members to move on to a lower tier of concerns affecting them. In the words of the proverb that many of us will undoubtedly recall from our childhoods, the pounds (the bigger and worrying crimes) having been taken care of we now need only look after the pence.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but we were never given much convincing evidence to support this wishful claim. Subsequently when interviewing residents of an area (an area of urban social housing) often associated with crime and ASB we found them to be concerned about a very familiar series of criminal and disorderly behaviours (Girling et al.2000). Crime levels in the ASB target areas often remain high and have seldom fallen to such a living memory all-time low that communities can now breathe a collective sigh of relief and move on to other issues.

While we were deliberating upon these questions, the first Annual Report of the Home Office campaign, Together: Tackling Anti-Social Behaviour was published (Home Office 2004), its launch accompanied by the familiar Blair and Blunkett double act keen to celebrate the government’s latest successes. The opening lines of the document boldly reiterated the upbeat governmental theme: ‘As crime has fallen, anti-social behaviour has become a major cause of concern in communities across the country.’

Our interest lies not primarily in relation to the claim about falling crime. The most recently available crime data suggest significant reductions in British Crime Survey (BCS) recorded crime in the risk of becoming a victim and levels of worry about major types of crime — and ASB (Dodd et al. 2004). Furthermore, year on year quarterly comparisons suggest an annual 5 per cent reduction in police recorded crime, but an overall total still hovering around the five million offences per year mark (Finney et al. 2004), although precise trends are difficult to discern because of the counting rule changes after 1997. Significantly, violent and sexual offences recorded by the police show increases in the range 13–18 per cent and, while the Home Office rightly claim that a large part of such increases will be attributable to improved recording practices, it is nevertheless important to register the particular significance of violence in shaping public fears and perceptions (Zimring and Hawkins 1997).

Rather than dispute the evidence about an apparently falling crime trend, our main concern here is with what this means, how it is interpreted and whether we are permitted to make the leap from falling crime to, therefore, this new priority of Anti-Social Behaviour. To a large extent we share Tonry’s (2004) observation that New Labour have made a specific priority of ASB, not so much inventing the idea as reappropriating it to serve a particular politics of enforcement. The kinds of problems that ASB has come to represent are not by any means new issues (juvenile nuisance, the moral standards of ‘the poor’) but in tapping into these concerns, creating what Frank Field has called ‘a new politics of behaviour’, New Labour have certainly connected with and orchestrated a wide range of late modernity’s ‘respectable fears’ (Pearson 1983). Tonry has suggested that this may prove to be a high–risk strategy, although there is already plenty of evidence to suggest that the government are aware of this and are taking steps to stop a risk becoming a liability for, as we argue later, managing public perceptions is an important aspect of ‘tackling ASB’.

Given that the naming and problematisation of ASB has been, in a number of important respects, government led, we are not convinced that its emergence as an issue has anything much to do with ‘falling crime’. As we indicated earlier, crime and disorder levels in the kinds of areas targeted for ASB enforcement often remain high. They have not fallen so obviously and significantly that residents of the most deprived communities can now relax and seek out other issues to worry about. For a start, even a quick glance at the Home Office’s typology of anti–social behaviours (see Chapter 2) reveals that a majority of the acts now classified as ASB are already crimes anyway. This points us to a different problem. The Home Office referred, in particular, to what it has termed ‘the justice gap’ (Home Office 2002a), the fact that a majority of offenders are not brought to court (to justice) and that an overwhelming majority of harmful, offensive or anti–social behaviours appears to achieve no redress. In this light, the politicisation of anti–socialto bear upon a collective problem, appears as an attempt to close the ‘justice gap’ through more effectively targeted and streamlined enforcement.

Here, we are in agreement with the important insights of Hansen et al.(2003) that the problem of ASB is perhaps best understood in relation to a perceived ‘enforcement deficit’. This is so in a number of senses. For Hansen and his colleagues, this ‘enforcement deficit’ concerns the fact that traditional criminal justice interventions tend to individualise their response around particular incidents and offenders and have no mechanism for addressing the collective and accumulating impact of harm and distress across a community. For these authors the precise contribution of a community safety perspective lies in the way it facilitates a shift in the ways in which we think about the cumulative impact of crime and disorder incidents (which, taken by themselves, might seem isolated and relatively trivial) upon communities and victims. The concept of ASB provides this perspective with both a rationale for taking this behaviour seriously and a mechanism for intervening. Thus ASB is anti–social in the way it undermines community cohesion, fragments shared values and erodes social capital. Disparate acts of an ‘anti-social’ nature are not victimless offences but, rather like the ‘incivilities’ described by Wilson and Kelling (1982), have a cumulative impact creating both climate and context in which ever more serious transgressions become normative and have to be endured.

Unfortunately, in the process of grounding this conception of the ‘justice gap’ within community safety discourse and policy, a subtle shift has occurred in the meaning of the concept. It first arose in a publication of the 1992 Commission on Social Justice (CSJ 1993) where it referred to the growing evidence of inequality and social exclusion in a society founded upon principles of equal citizenship. For community safety it became the dilemma of ensuring criminal justice in the absence of social justice, as evidence began to mount of the devastating impact of crime and disorder and concentrations of victimisation in the most deprived areas. Yet as Crawford has commented, a higher priority is accorded ‘to crime prevention — as opposed to poverty prevention’ (Crawford 1998: 121). Finally, for the Home Office, the ‘justice gap’ has become a question of criminal justice system performance — justice through enforcement.

A second aspect of the perceived enforcement deficit relates directly to questions of youth offending. During the 1990s and, especially after the defining moment of 1993, the abduction and murder of James Bulger, had passed, we began to see an increasing level of complaint regarding the alleged impunity with which young ‘delinquents’ could act, apparently confident that neither the police nor the rest of the youth justice system could touch them. This emerging complaint was not especially new but it was effectively orchestrated by a policing lobby (Faulkner 2001) and came to focus specifically upon a number of perceived weaknesses of the youth justice system. In due course, these criticisms were articulated in the avowedly ideological title of the white paper No More Excuses published by New Labour 1997 (Home Office 1997a). A number of issues surfaced — the policy of diversion, repeat cautioning, delays, inadequate enforcement and ‘bail bandits’. Taken together, these suggested a system in need of substantial reform — riddled, as it were, with ‘justice gaps’. Given that young people were seen to be responsible for a substantial proportion of the ASB endured by communities (Campbell 2002a) and that ASB itself was seen as a seedbed of future, more persistent, delinquency (Audit Commission 1996; Farrington 1996), here were two compelling reasons to tackle this ‘enforcement deficit’. This is also why, in this book, we consider it essential to address ASB and youth justice in tandem. As we argue later, each policy area informs and complements the other.

A final aspect of this perceived ‘enforcement deficit’ relating to ASB involves a number of areas of concern relating to social policy agencies and their engagement with the family. Lately these issues have acquired a new coherence under the guise of a ‘responsibilisation strategy’ (O’Malley 1992; Garland 2001: 124). Through this strategy, in a more explicit application of contractual and communitarian principles (although plainly authoritarian versions of these ideas), an increasing number of policy functions have been delegated to families and communities. In essence, these processes are similar to the ‘governing through the family’ described by Donzelot (1979) or the establishment of governmental relationships (Foucault 1990; Garland 1996) between the family and other state agencies which we have earlier referred to as a kind of ‘disciplining’ or criminalising of social policy (Squires 1990). This ‘policing of the family’ manifests itself most obviously in the attempt to discipline parents (Parenting Orders) and hold them ever more criminally responsible for the offending behaviour of their children. Obviously this is by no means a new dimension of British social policy (Stedman-Jones 1971; Wohl 1977; Utting et al. 1993; Morris 1994) and, drawing upon this history, Jones and Novak were clearly correct in their observation that the burden of the new laws proposed to discipline parents would not fall upon the affluent families of middle England (1999: 150) but upon the inhabitants of Britain’s poorest and most deprived neighbourhoods, social housing estates and communities.

Accordingly, as the New Labour ‘social exclusion’ agenda unfolded (Social Exclusion Unit 1998; Howarth et al. 1999, 2002) and a series of ‘joined-up’ situational social policy initiatives were installed in these ‘most deprived’ areas, there seemed no little irony in the fact that, where New Deal initiatives were established, the relations of scrutiny and discipline could be ever more acute. Crime and disorder issues had always been a key component of New Labour’s understanding of the problems of the poorest areas. In this respect at least, the government’s inheritance from left realist criminology remained intact. For example, the Social Exclusion Unit presented the issue in the following terms, foregrounding the residents’ perceptions of and concerns about crime and ASB:

Poor neighbourhoods are not just a housing problem … there is no single definition of a poor neighbourhood … they have poverty, unemployment and poor health in common and crime usually comes high on a list of residents’ concerns. (SEU 1998: 13)

A subsequent report by Policy Action Team 8, set up by the SEU to help develop responses to ASB, further elaborated the problem:

ASB is a widespread problem. It is a problem that is more prevalent in deprived neighbourhoods. Its effects are often most damaging in communities that are already fragile and where services are overstretched. Serious hard-core perpetrators are small in number but their behaviour has a disproportionate impact on large numbers of ordinary people … Anti-social behaviour is perceived to be twice as high in deprived areas than nationally … is considered to be a medium to large problem by three-quarters of social landlords … and appears to be increasing. (SEU 2000: 7)

However, in practice, when attempting to address such issues politically, some of the language employed betrayed levels of contempt and intolerance reminiscent of Victorian society’s treatment of the supposed ‘underclass’ (McLaughlin 2002). According to the Prime Minister, the scourge of so many deprived communities were ‘young people with nothing to do [but] make life hell for other citizens’ (Blair 1997). And from such pronouncements it is then but a short step to the demonisation of ‘louts’, ‘yobs’ and ‘neighbours from hell’.

In New Deal for Communities areas, the newly established community safety teams began to use the additional leverage afforded by their housing management responsibilities to address problems of crime, disorder and anti–social behaviour. In this they were able to draw upon the developing experience of local authorities using housing management powers and tenancy agreement provisions to address neighbour disputes and the unacceptable behaviour of tenants (Burney 1999). While the Labour Party, still in opposition, had outlined its plans for taking tougher action against nuisance neighbours, drawing a clear connection between the effective management of ASB and community safety (Labour Party 1995), the Conservatives’ 1996 Housing Act had conferred new enforcement powers upon social housing landlords (Flint 2002). In this way, social policy institutions became useful vehicles for exercising a certain leverage over parents. Although the focus of much of this new enforcement action concerned housing management, a survey of social landlords in 2001 found that 77 per cent of the latter identified 12–17 year olds as the most relevant group for their ASB enforcement action (Hunter and Nixon 2001). With the coming of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) and Acceptable Behaviour Contracts (ABCs) the emphasis on youth control which had been at the heart of this enforcement activity became all the more explicit. No less obvious was the emergence of a pattern of ‘postcode enforcement’ practice. By virtue of their status as social housing tenants, residents of certain communities could be subjected to a more intensive scrutiny of their lifestyles, behaviour and relationships and rendered more vulnerable to enforcement action. The power to evict problematic tenants was the leverage available to social landlords and, in due course, as we describe in a later chapter, it was this threat of eviction which was employed to give teeth to the ABCs. The threat of eviction was used to give parents an additional ‘incentive’ to manage their children ‘more responsibly’ and curb their offending and disorderly behaviour. The threat of eviction was said to ‘get their attention and concentrate their minds wonderfully’. In a similar vein, later proposals extended an idea of reducing or withholding social security benefits paid to offenders, perpetrators of ASB or offenders failing to comply with the terms of their community punishment or reparation orders.

The proposal emerged from the same ‘contractual’ model of citizenship that New Labour had espoused long before it took office (Commission on Social Justice 1993); rights were to be linked to duties, responsibility was to earn respect. Only the fact that withholding benefits to some of the poorest and most inadequate offenders might just be the most criminogenic and counter-productive option conceivable persuaded some, not least the probation officers who would be managing the pilot projects, to voice their opposition. In any event, proposals of this sort, imposing tougher discipline and social controls upon the poorest through social welfare interventions, are scarcely a new feature of social policy (Piven and Cloward 1972). The difference now may simply be the degree to which social policy has become crime and disorder focused (or ‘criminalised’). Paradoxically, this may be occurring just as the problem of crime itself is becoming rather less clear cut, absorbed and obscured by a growing and diverse range of perceived risks, insecurities, fears, harms, immoralities, dangers and ‘anti-social’ threats, behaviours — and persons — for which and for whom our society is having to evolve new responses. It is, in this broadest sense, that we relate the problem posed by ASB with a series of perceived ‘enforcement deficits’ with which late-modern nation-states are now struggling to cope (Crawford 2002).

It is for these reasons that, in this book, we approach the question of responding to youth offending and ‘tackling’ anti-social behaviour through the perspective of a perceived enforcement deficit. Our argument is almost entirely contrary to that ventured earlier by, among others, politicians, local authority enforcement officials (the new class of ASB coordinators) and summarised in the Together campaign’s first Annual Report, namely that ‘as crime has fallen, anti-social behaviour has become a major cause of concern’. By contrast, we are witnessing crime and disorder being reproblematised as ‘anti-social’ activity, thereby lending a spurious new integrity to the politics of exclusion, to intolerance and to inequality. A whole new raft of enforcement opportunities are being developed to address the perpetrators of these offending behaviours. Unlike earlier discourses we no longer prioritise ‘treatment’, ‘cure’ or ‘education’, and still less do we attempt to improve the disadvantaged social, domestic or environmental contexts in which an overwhelming majority of today’s anti-social (and offending) young people fail to develop into successful and responsible adults. We overlook the criminogenic social contexts bearing down upon the ‘delinquent’ and concentrate largely upon their choices and behaviour. This leaves us with relatively few options in either understanding or dealing with their behaviour. We interpret the behaviour as typical of ‘that kind of person’, as Christie (2004: 49) has noted, offensive and anti-social people ‘are their own explanation’ thereby ensuring our overreliance upon discipline, punishment and containment.

For us this problematisation of ASB marks the arrival of an increasingly insecure, divided and intolerant culture. Likewise, the policing of ASB suggests an increasingly disciplinary society and, contrary to contemporary political rhetoric regarding social inclusion, a markedly more exclusive one, selectively targeting a particular range of stigmatised behaviours and individuals for reasons that are often beyond the perpetrators’ control and, at best, for which they are seldom solely responsible.

In the first chapter which follows, we attempt to trace the emergence of this new discourse on ASB, linking current concerns about youth and ASB to wider preoccupations with the ‘condition of Britain’ by which New Labour in general and Tony Blair in particular have been concerned. What was needed was a firmer sense of social responsibilities, ‘tougher love’ and stricter discipline in our key social institutions. Many of New Labour’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 The new politics of behaviour: anti-social behaviour as a contested terrain
• 2 The irresistible rise of anti-social behaviour
• 3 The secret history of anti-social behaviour?
• 4 Making links or breaking links? ASB and the New Youth Justice
• 5 The enforcement of acceptable behaviour
• 6 Nipped in the Bud - youthful transitions or criminal careers?
• 7 Anti-social behaviour, social control and the precautionary principle: new views 'from the boys'
• References
• Index