You may remember that this is the place where the council spent £15,000 to remove a set of steps on which young people liked to sit. It’s also the place where a housing association sees fit to impose a 9pm curfew on its tenants’ children.

Now the borough’s police and town centre retailers have teamed up to hand out “Positive Citizen” discount cards for local shops and businesses to the area’s youths — which they’ll lose if they misbehave.

Most young people are perfectly capable of staying out of trouble. They need neither a reminder nor an incentive to do the right thing. For those that aren’t, particularly those who misbehave habitually or impulsively, I’m sceptical whether the prospect of a future discount at McDonalds or Top Shop will be enough to prevent the current guilty thought progressing to a guilty act. The very nature of the scheme, which requires youths to apply formally for membership, will likely repel and exclude those already dismissive or suspicious of authority.

But the real problem isn’t that it’s unlikely to work, it’s that it’s likely to further muddle and weaken the notion of citizenship among young people in general. Citizenship works best when citizens have a common collective purpose and mutual respect. The role of the citizen is largely informal, varied and often subtle. Beyond keeping the law and meeting our formal obligations, good citizenship requires our active participation in improving the life of the community. This might mean nothing more than a friendly and positive demeanour in the street, a helping hand offered spontaneously to those that need one, or a more structured effort to work towards the common good. We may feel a sense of satisfaction by doing these things, but the benefits are largely collective and often hard to quantify. The motivation is considerably more complex than a simple economic incentive, instinctive rather than calculated.

Conversely, the effort-leading-to-reward model, particularly when the reward is a discount on the high street, maps directly onto consumerist impulses which we know simply decrease satisfaction and reinforce existing social and economic divides. Beyond a certain level of security and subsistence, the more you shop (or think about shopping), the less happy you are. Tapping into young people’s already considerable status anxiety and offering rewards that can only be realised by shopping is a recipe for a lifetime of misery, not young people growing into adults whose instinct is to ask, “How can I help?” rather than, “What’s in it for me?”

UPDATE 10 August 2008 from the Sutton Guardian:

Dr Roy Bailey, a consultant clinical psychologist, expressed worries that youngsters would need professional support once photo cards were withdrawn.

As always, truth is stranger than fiction.

Coverage elsewhere:

• “Junk food bribes for teens”, a2to.info
• “You won’t fool the children of the revolution”, Londonist
• “Sutton police bribe kids to be good”, This is Local London
• “Experts attack police ‘bribery’ scheme”, Sutton Guardian
• “Sutton police bribe kids to behave”, The Register