We shouldn’t have believed the hype. For all of Tony Blair’s earnest focus on
Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, this flagship policy was barely in effect at all. By the latest figures, only 18,670 ASBOs were issued
between April 1999 and the start of 2010. According to this Policy Exchange report –
the best on the subject that I’ve come across – that accounts for around 0.009 per cent of all incidences of anti-social behaviour.
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So let’s not pretend that the coalition is upending the criminal justice system by shifting away from ASBOs today. Neither, on the evidence at hand, is it doing away with an effective policy. Here’s a graph that I’ve put together from the latest Home Office statistics. It shows that over half of all ASBOs have been breached, at least once, by their recipients:
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