Peter Squires and Dawn Stephen have given the field of anti-social behaviour studies an ambitious book. In it they attempt to connect the anti-social behaviour (ASB) agenda – as it has been carried out against young people – to grand theoretical discourses about the ontological insecurities of late modernity (Young, Reference Young1999). The first two-thirds of the book break down their overarching critique into a number of facets. Chapter 1 provides a critical introduction to anti-social behaviour. Chapter 2 considers the semantics of ‘anti-social behaviour’ and its place in the policy history of New Labour's crime initiatives. Chapter 3 makes the case that particular strands of positivist criminological research have played into and encouraged a government disinterest in why young people misbehave. Chapter 4 draws on the classic work of Stan Cohen (and the criminological readings of Foucault) to recast anti-social behaviour initiatives as new techniques of net widening. The authors introduce their own primary research in Chapters 5 and 6 to give flesh to their arguments, and conclude in Chapter 7 with a nihilist vision of the future where those young people with the most disadvantaged backgrounds are almost permanently marginalised.

The timing of such a fundamental critique of ASB is unusual in that the book is attempting to characterise the legacy of what, after all, amounts to a pretty new policy approach. This has the effect of rendering some arguments hesitant or murky. On the one hand, they show how the construction of young people's behaviour as ‘anti-social’ is, far from representing an empirically new social phenomenon, just another formulation of an age old anxiety about kids being kids. But, on the other hand, they want to distinguish ASB as especially important and influential, demonstrating a sea change in how the problems of youth are characterised: ‘We are not arguing . . . that the behaviour of youth has become uniquely intolerable in late modernity, but rather . . . that the circumstances of late modernity seem bound to create additional tensions around youth, tensions with which these societies appear less able (or even willing) to cope’ (p. 45). ASB comes across sometimes as an empirical reality, sometimes as the response to an empirical given, and at other times is treated purely as a social construction.

Identifying exactly what ASB means (to the authors, to the government, to modernity's commentators) presents a difficult challenge, one which the authors defer partly by cloaking it as New Labour's ‘rediscovery of anti-social behaviour’, an evasive phrase that appears throughout the work. Through language like this, Squires and Stephen stop short of treating ASB simply as a social construction emerging from Labour's politics of representation, and yet they provide ample evidence that this is the case. They point out like so many others that New Labour's draconian crime control policies have emerged at a time when crime rates have been falling, and concern about crime is not as dominant a priority as it has been in earlier years. The rising rate of fear of crime, they suggest, has been fuelled partly by the government's own publicity surrounding its crime agenda. They also do a good job of showing how certain strands of criminological research, singling out the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development as exemplary, pathologise young people from poorer backgrounds and dangerously focus the discipline on the goal of prediction in the development of theory. Similarly, work in psychology, that has given us the concept of the anti-social personality, assists the trend of pathologising young peoples’ often unremarkable activities (lying to parents, using drugs, having sex) along class lines and entrenches their construction as objects not people, producing the ‘“essentialisation” of young people as “Other”’ (p. 126, citing Young, Reference Young1999).

Against these trends, the authors use Chapters 5 and 6 to bring in the voices of youths and their families on what it is like to be on the wrong end of the ASB agenda. We learn about the ordinary and admirable aspirations of young people to become working, contributing members of society; we share their parents’ frustration that Acceptable Behaviour Contracts (ABCs) are used to deal with their children's learning disabilities; we hear how the stigmatisation of an ASBO plays out for the young person in such quotidian but important ways as not getting invited to a birthday party. The contributions of Squires and Stephen's interviewees make it difficult to contest their main message that ASBOs and ABCs have amounted to the ‘criminalisation of social policy’ (p. 40) and, we might add, the criminalisation of social life.

Criminologists are party to this criminalisation when we neglect the ‘lived experience’ of the people under observation; a neglect the authors see as widespread due to the ‘hegemonic’ position of positivist criminology. In the chapter entitled ‘The secret history of anti-social behaviour?’, the secret to which they refer, I think, is the role that professional criminology has played over time in subtly giving direction to government views about young people. Thus they astutely see longitudinal work like the Cambridge Study as valuable ‘not so much [for] the tracking of a birth cohort's criminal career development’ but as an opportunity to study ‘the shifting terrain and concerns of criminological discourse itself’ (p. 51). This is one of the more fascinating chapters of the book, and a welcome addition to the generally staid work on the history of criminology.

Of course by turning the focus inwards, on to criminology itself, they equally expose themselves to scrutiny. And to their credit, they take on board David Smith's concern that ‘the target of critical commentators is the “language of New labour's policies rather than their effects”’ (p. 126, citing Smith, Reference Smith2003). Introducing their own research with young people moves us towards an understanding of these effects. I have two criticisms of the data they present, however. First, interview excerpts are presented copiously and without much organisation. We gain an impressionistic sense of the views of a small number, but this is not provided any context or related to, dare I say it?, more quantitative work on the impact of ASB policies. It would be interesting to know about the pre- and post-ASB rates of eviction, homelessness and criminal proceedings, for example, to see whether ASBOs have any systematic effects in disrupting these families’ lives. Second, the selected excerpts present the interviewees in an unconditionally sympathetic light. Qualitative methods risk their own forms of pathology, and one of these might be a simplified representation of people mainly as victims.

I admire the aspiration of this book, and hope it encourages more work that connects policy research to wider debates about the nature of control in modern times. Sometimes the writing wanders a bit around the many arguments characterising these times (Beck, Garland, Foucault, Cohen, Bauman, Christie) dipping in and out of the barrels of evidence, and some of the chapters overlap a bit in coverage. It would have been strengthened by more, and more rigorously organised, data from their own research. Overall, though, this is a refreshing piece of work that avoids dry cataloguing of how ASBOs work and will offer a much needed critical edge to the ongoing interest in anti-social behaviour.