'Anti-social behaviour' has become a label attached to a huge range of nuisance and petty crime, and rarely out of the headlines as tackling this problem has become a central part of the British government's crime control policy. At the same time 'anti-social behaviour' has provided the lever for control mechanisms ranging from the draconian to the merely bureaucratic, most notably in the shape of the Anti-Social Behaviour Order, or ASBO.

This book seeks to explain why anti-social behaviour, as a focus of political rhetoric, legislative activity and social action, has gained such a high profile in Britain in recent years, and it provides a critical examination of current policies of enforcement and exclusion. It examines both the political roots of the variety of new measures which have been introduced and also the deeper social explanations for the unease expressed about anti-social behaviour more generally.

This updated new edition of Making People Behave takes full account of recent legal and policy changes, including the 'Respect' agenda, as well as relevant research on the subject. It also contains two wholly new chapters, one of them devoted to the expanding web of behaviour controls, the other on Scotland which provides an alternative to the enforcement-oriented approach evident in England and Wales – complementing the wider coverage in the book of developments in North America and Europe.

One of the most useful studies of 'antisocial behaviour, politics and policy' is Making People Behave written by Elizabeth Burney. Burney attempts to understand the rise of the antisocial behavior framework within the wider political and policy developments in the UK. To do this she initially explores the ‘intervention’ of antisocial behaviour by the Labour party, not as a conspiracy but through Labour’s engagement with the anxieties of their working class constituents—anxieties that at a policy level became reformulated around a particular understanding of the social problem ‘antisocial behaviour’.

-Stuart Waiton, Springer Science & Business Media B.V. 2010

Elizabeth Burney is based at the Cambridge Institute of Criminology.