Youngest Asbo criminal jailed for violent raid, his 76th offence
A NOTORIOUS career criminal who stacked up numerous convictions after becoming the youngest person ever to be given an Asbo at the age of 12 has been jailed for six years for his part in a violent machete raid.
Robert White, now 29, was first given an Anti-Social Behaviour Order banning him from his local town centre in 1999 following complaints about his threatening and abusive behaviour.
The order failed to stop his behaviour, and three years later he had stacked up a catalogue of 186 alleged offences. At 15 he was sentenced to a year at a young offenders’ institution after admitting burglary and car theft. He was jailed for four months at the age of 18 after admitting breaching his Asbo and assaulting a police officer. On his 19th birthday he was sentenced to 10 months in custody for driving dangerously in a car chase with the police. At 21, in 2008, he was jailed for more than four years for threatening a shopkeeper with a machete.
He has now been imprisoned again, for being one of four “mob-handed” offenders who raided a house armed with an axe and machete, beating up residents and stealing a car.
Bristol Crown Court heard White had been in court on 33 previous occasions for a total of 75 offences.
Christopher Smyth, defending, said: “He was not holding the machete and he did not drive the vehicle.” White pleaded guilty to robbery and was sentenced to six years and four months.
David Spencer, director of research at the Centre for Crime Prevention said the case was “one of countless examples of the ineffectiveness of Asbos and other such injunctions and soft justice approaches.”
“Far from stopping louts from re-offending they actively encouraged it by acting as a badge of honour.”