Brace yourselves for a new crime wave sweeping across the country — the government is doing away with ASBOs. Or, rather, don’t. The truth about ASBOs is that they were rather less significant than Labour would have you believe. As reports such as this one from Policy Exchange suggest, they’ve probably cropped up more frequently in newspaper articles than they have in real life. Only 20,335 ASBOs have been issued to date, covering less than one per cent of all incidences of anti-social behaviour.
What’s more, there’s little evidence to suggest that those ASBOs that were issued made much difference. As the graph below shows, 57 per cent of all ASBOs have been breached at least once by their recipients.
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