How not to discipline the yobs

last updated 8 January 2015

United Kingdom

Jon Robins

The much ballyhooed “anti-social behavior orders” aren’t working, said Jon Robins in the London Guardian. When they were introduced in 2003, “ASBOs,” as they’re called, seemed the perfect weapon against “yobs”—the young ruffians who spend their free time wallowing in public drunkenness, brawling, and vandalism. An ASBO could be a restraining order, forbidding a thug to go near his old victims, or it could be a curfew, requiring a yob to be home every night by 11. It sounded good, but critics say the program is both too easily abused and too easily flouted. City councils abuse ASBOs by slapping them on people who are merely eccentric, not criminal. Orders have been served on “a Norfolk farmer after his pigs ran amok in neighbors’ gardens” and on “a Scottish woman banning her from answering her front door in her underwear.” The real yobs, meanwhile, simply ignore their curfews. And none of this is helping those whose lives are truly “made a misery from anti-social neighbors.”