ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the issues of legitimacy and compliance at the peripheries of criminal justice in the context of anti-social behaviour related interventions. Governmental concerns regarding ‘anti-social behaviour’, incivility and disorder have become a major political preoccupation in the last decade or so. Whilst this has found expression in various Western societies (van Swaaningen, 2008; Levi, 2009; Beckett and Herbert, 2010), nowhere has this been more evident than in the UK, England in particular, 1 where it has provided the fertile terrain out of which considerable regulatory innovations have spawned. Above all else, the British anti-social behaviour agenda and many of the new powers to which it has given rise are targeted at, and concerned with, the question of governing ‘troublesome youth’. The panoply of new laws, powers and technologies has been considerable. Novel regulatory tools include, inter alia, anti-social behaviour orders (ASBO), housing injunctions, acceptable behaviour contracts, parenting orders, parenting contracts, tenancy demotion orders, ‘crack-house’ and premise closure orders, designated public places orders, dispersal orders, (alcohol-related) directions to leave an area, as well as a variety of penalty notices for disorder.
