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Original article: Registro de Vándalos e Incivilidades: El caso británico como modelo derogado por su propio fracaso

By Sofía Brito

The term «registry» evokes a sense of method and order, suggesting a state that knows who is who and can thereby offer better protection against crime.

In response to the degradation of public spaces, documenting those responsible appears reasonable, and each measure of the project, viewed individually, presents an obvious rationale.

However, little of this evidence withstands scrutiny: neither does the registry serve, in legal terms, the function its name implies; nor do the components it gathers operate as expected; nor does the experience of countries that have tried these measures support the intuition.

Under the reassuring facade of registering and marking dangerous subjects, the project assembles a device unprecedented worldwide.

This bill is the result of stitching together components from systems that originate from incompatible legal logics. In the UK, there were Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, followed by Criminal Behaviour Orders and civil injunctions, creating a model for managing incivilities in public space.

From the United States, the collateral consequences of criminal conviction activate disqualifications for public housing, social assistance, or scholarships, leading to civil death¹. Public or police consultation records exist in over 30 countries, but they are limited to sex offenders or prohibitions on attending sporting events.

Meanwhile, Spain’s covenants ordinances penalize begging, consuming alcohol in public spaces, sleeping on the streets, or rummaging through trash.² The project extracts these components from their context and assembles them without the fabric that made them functional, merging logics that remain separate in comparative terms and that their own systems have already revised or abandoned.

First, the systems that penalize incivilities (in the UK and Spain) do not do so through criminal law, but rather through administrative measures: a limited fine in a straightforward process, without a criminal record or deprivation of rights. In Spain, these are minor infractions of low value, and none results in the loss of housing, pension, or passport.

Reserving incivility for administrative law is a means to maintain proportion between the lightness of the conduct and the response. The project reverses this; it groups under the category «vandalism» serious offenses like the murder of a prosecutor and smaller issues like spray painting a wall, alongside evasion and arson. This equivalence does not exist anywhere: treating the unequal as equal defines disproportionality.

Secondly, the only precedent that links a conviction with the loss of benefits is the American model of collateral consequences. However, these are civil sanctions, meaning that one loses eligibility for certain benefits without a public record as an offender. In the most severe cases, they affect felony charges and result in exclusion from public housing, social assistance, and scholarships; the Welfare Act of 1996 even imposed a lifetime ban on food assistance for drug convictions.

This is precisely the model that American doctrine has harshly criticized, termed «civil death,» as after serving the sentence, individuals remain perpetually punished through a host of exclusions from housing, employment, and education, disrupting their ability to rebuild their lives and driving them back into crime.

Thirdly, the principle of connection, respected by all systems, is violated. The Pension Schemes Act of 1993 in the UK serves as a clear counterexample to this bill, as officials lose part of their pension only when the crime directly correlates with the execution of their duties (corruption, bribery) and harms public interest.³

Benefits are only affected when the crime relates to their source. The project inverses that logic by withdrawing social benefits for behaviors that bear no relation to them. Where the British model demands a nexus between both behaviors, the registry project disregards any nexus.

Let’s examine in more detail the management of incivilities in the UK and its repealed policy.

In 1998, during Tony Blair’s government, the Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBO) were enacted. Their design shared the same rationale as the current project under discussion: 1.- The idea that minor disturbances are addressed through administrative measures that mark offenders. 2.- The willingness to sacrifice guarantees (civil, political, or social, economic, and cultural rights) in the name of agility. 3.- Its focus was on youth.

However, there was not a national, permanent, open-access database listing everyone with an ASBO; rather, it was an individual court order. Its publicity was due to the administrative practice of dissemination, not a formal registry. Local authorities and police publicized the order within the area it applied: distributing flyers with photographs, names, lists of behaviors, and prohibited zones, and sometimes posting signs in public.

The Home Office’s 2005 guidelines established that «publicity should be the norm, not the exception,» explicitly arguing that the community needed to know who was subject to orders, for example, not to enter a certain neighborhood, not to enter a business, not to consume alcohol in public, and not to say certain words, among other measures.⁴

Still, they were repealed in 2014 after a documented failure by the British government (conservative), which justified the repeal by stating that «the rates of non-compliance are high and the number of orders has steadily declined since 2005.»⁵

Minister Theresa May announced in 2010 that it was time to «move beyond» ASBOs; cross-party criticism highlighted that they unnecessarily criminalized youth and, for some, they had become a «badge of honor» rather than a deterrent and had turned into a conveyor belt to prison for many young people starting out with orders for non-criminal issues, such as spray painting walls.⁶

They were replaced by Criminal Behaviour Orders (2014): additional orders to a conviction but issued by a court on a case-by-case basis, with individualized prohibitions (not an automatic package), with positive requirements (drug treatments, courses, training) and without the loss of social benefits. They are a measured judicial decision, not an automatic effect. The Chilean registry lacks all three guarantees: it is automatic, purely disqualifying, and affects social rights.

More critically, the present situation is noteworthy. In 2026, the UK introduced Respect Orders, which design moves in the opposite direction of the Chilean project: only against those over 18 (excludes teenagers); a maximum term of two years; prior risk assessment; issued individually by a court; with rehabilitation requirements, not merely prohibitions.⁷

And even that version hasn’t escaped criticism; in 2025, various technical bodies warned Parliament that there was no evidence that they reduced antisocial behavior and that they might disproportionately affect vulnerable groups. Therefore, they are implemented as a pilot, subject to prior evaluation, explicitly warned not to unjustifiably affect the most vulnerable.⁸

Marking Serves No Purpose

The government project goes even further than that repealed British policy. It takes the logic of public exposure that existed in the UK as a diffuse and controversial practice and institutionalizes it as a registry.

This difference is more decisive today than ever, for one technological reason. The British mark depended on a physical and territorial support, such as flyers with photographs, signs in public spaces, or notices in local newspapers, which confined it to a particular neighborhood and time: once the dissemination was exhausted, so was the effect.

The Chilean registry goes beyond this; in the era of social media, there is no need for signs or flyers, since a central, searchable registration disseminates, replicates, and becomes permanent by itself, without distributing flyers and without the authority imposing it being able to contain its circulation, even after a person is later excluded from the Registry.

The mark no longer expires where the prohibition previously applied; it transcends territory, time, and state control. The project adopts the most stigmatizing technique of the British model, disregarding the lessons that the UK gleaned from two decades of implementation: marking does not reduce crime.

The Chilean government proposes to institutionalize, with the limitless reach that digital circulation today allows, exactly what the UK discarded as stigmatizing and ineffective. There’s no innovation here, just the aggravated reinstatement of a recognized error.

(*) Sofía Brito is a lawyer, AJD member, and a PhD student in Law at the University of Chile.

NOTES

1Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (United States).

2Eduardo Melero Alonso, “Local ordinances as instruments of social exclusion: regulations affecting homeless individuals are administrative law of the enemy”, Journal of Local and Autonomous Administration Studies (REALA), New Era, no. 6 (November 2016): 7-26.

3Pension Schemes Act 1993 (UK), sec. 91-92 (forfeiture of public pension for crimes linked to the execution of duties).

4 See: https://statewatch.org/observatories/2004-2010-asbowatch-monitoring-the-use-of-anti-social-behaviour-orders/#what-is-an-asbo

5Home Office / Ministry of Justice, Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) Statistics: England and Wales 2013.

6See: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/jul/28/asbos-theresa-may-home-secretary

7See: Home Office, Crime and Policing Bill: Antisocial Behaviour (ASB) Factsheet (2025), gov.uk.

8See: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5901/cmpublic/CrimePolicing/memo/CPB119.htm.

La entrada Dismantling the Registry of Vandalism and Incivility: The British Case as a Failed Model se publicó primero en El Ciudadano.