In this article in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, Christopher Caldwell criticizes the practice of imposing anti-social behavior orders, or ASBO’s, on individuals. The concept was new to me, but as I understand it, Tony Blair’s administration has introduced these highly specific injunctions that can be imposed on individual people by law enforcement officers, provided they are approved by court authorities. According to the article, about 97% of ASBO requests are granted.
If I’m understanding this correctly, this means that I could be slapped with a “Zahava may not leave the house after one AM” order if I had recently antagonized people by being out late and waking up my neighbors.
I’m wondering if anyone thinks this is justifiable. In my admittedly less-than-informed opinion, it seems wrong for the law to have specific authority over aspects of my personal life. If, in fact, my after-hours roughhousing is against the law, I should be charged for that. If it is not, it should not be made against the law for me.
Caldwell draws what I think is a false analogy between ASBO’s and Rudy Giuliani’s crackdown on minor criminal offenses like turnstile-jumping and vandalism. Those things are, in fact, against the law, and choosing to enforce the law isn’t encroaching on anyone’s rights. But I do think it’s dangeroug to legislate against individuals and their specific behaviors.
Does anyone think the ASBO’s are a good thing? Would any British dopers have a more comprehensive, informed view that they could share?
The statistic about how many are granted may be related to the process by which they are applied for; quite a lot has to happen before an ASBO is actualy ordered; I’d imagine a fair proportion of requests (the unreasonable ones, I hope) are weeded out in earler stages of the process.
I do. Professional criminals are not the people that make walking the streets after dark dangerous - drunken louts and street thugs are. If they can be removed from the streets the rest of us will be much better off.
I don’t know why they aren’t. Maybe they are and the courts give them a slap on the wrist? I don’t really know.
By the way I’m talking about street thugs (AKA yobbos) in Sydney, Australia where I currently live. When I lived in the UK I never once experienced aggression from people on the street.
One of the difficulties is that although they could be arrested, prosecutions are difficult - witnesses are often neighbours, and are easily intimidated (or will just feel intimidated, without anything actually happening). Also, the principles behind Asbos are that the same burden of proof isn’t necessary, because they’re not given for a single offence but for if a consistent pattern of problem behaviour can be demonstrated.
You were lucky.
This is where critics of Asbos (I’d call myself a reluctant critic) see the problem. You’re removing the symptom, while doing nothing to tackle the cause. Removing an individual from the streets isn’t going to turn them into a model citizen overnight - and could further alienate them from a society which they already have a problem fitting into. It also fails to recognise the complex reasons why so many kids end up behaving in such ways.
Sometimes the reasons given for Asbos aren’t actually criminal offences (for example, a farmer received an Asbo for not keeping his pigs fenced in properly) which is my main concern about them - you can be set to prison without committing a criminal offence.
A police officer can present evidence on behalf of witnesses who want to remain anonymous. (One of the elements of Asbos which is clearly open to abuse.)
The objections raised are very similar to my own objections about involuntary psychiatric detention (and involuntary outpatient commitment in particular), i.e., it exists because there is a perceived need to control people whose behavior is not a violation of law and/or where their rights as a person accused of such a violation are an impediment to putting a stop to their behavior, and that it represents a threat to civil liberties to have such a system.
(In the case of psychiatrization, of course, the deviant gets medicalized and the control-effort is redefined as being done for the recipient, although when the issues are debated it becomes apparent that the bulk of support for the practice comes from the community’s desire to have disturbing people put somewhere or taken somewhere so they won’t be disturbed by them any more).
It’s wrong. Insofar as we’ve gone with a legal system in which sanctions are tied to demonstrable offenses of specific laws, via a process in which the accused has a right to know the charges, defend against them, be confronted with the accusers and the evidence, have an opportunity to refute with other evidence, and so on, there’s no legitimate excuse for opening a “trap door” for dealing with undesirables who inconveniently get on our nerves without the legal system bringing them to a stop.
If the legal system isn’t addressing the situation, the legal system should be modified so that it does so; and if its very premises and structures are insufficient to allow it to handle the situation, we need to step back and reconsider how we deal with each other’s behavior.
But this kind of solution, papered over with a lot of “It Won’t Be Done To You, Just Them Undesirables”, is paternalistic and tyrannical and oppressive.
Neither doctors nor judges should be able to simply & arbitrarily point a finger and say “For YOU the law is ‘You don’t get to do that any more’ and if you do we’ll lock you up.”
This is something I didn’t know about, and it worries me. This could never happen in America, as it’s a clear violation of a defendant’s constitutional right to confront his accuser. How is witness testimony admissible if it’s offered by someone other than the witness?
This is important, and the lengthy process an ASBO goes through before implementation is reassuring. Still, I keep going back to my main issue: How can we justify jailing someone for a non-criminal offense? Isn’t it a massively slippery slope when we start outlawing individuals’ behavior because it’s “anti-social”?
If ASBO’s a last resort to punish criminal behavior that’s difficult to prosecute, as has been suggested, then I would think the best course of action would be to improve the judicial system, not add a new dimension of criminality.
I don’t know. Like I say, I’m a reluctant critic of these things - I see all the flaws, but I’ve also experienced the neverending frustration of living in an area terrorised by a few kids. I can sympathise with all the reasons given for the failure of the normal justice system to deal with them - but I still feel like saying ‘is this the best alternative?’
100% agreed. It’s scarily totalitarian: “you’ve not committed a crime, but if you ignore us, you have”
My (gasp) long-term solution would be to work out what the hell is causing us to have such big problems. Sure, have the police deal with today’s crimes. But who are the delinquent 14-year-olds of the next decade? Where did we go wrong with this lot, that we could change for the next generation?
OK, so I’m being idealist, or simplifying things beyond meaningful debate. But I’ve still to hear any answer from any supporter of Asbos as to what happens to the ‘Asbo-ee’ once they’re ‘released’.
I believe that an important point is that Asbos come under civil law, where the burden of proof is lower than in criminal cases (balance of probability, rather than ‘beyond reasonable doubt’). So even when it’s impossible to convict somebody of a crime, it’s possible to impose an Asbo - and the Asbo includes the threat of incarceration.
(Disclaimer - I may be wrong about the burden of proof)