The Back-Door Governance of Crime: Confiscating Criminal Assets in the UK

The policy and practice of confiscating criminal assets to control crime and recover illicit wealth has come to occupy a central position in national and international policing and security agendas. However, this practice has raised many questions about agencies’ abilities to measure success and als...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:European journal on criminal policy and research 2021-12, Vol.27 (4), p.495-515
Main Authors: Chistyakova, Yulia, Wall, David S., Bonino, Stefano
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Assets
Confiscation
Crime prevention
Criminology and Criminal Justice
Governance
Government agencies
International security
Law and Criminolgy
Law enforcement
National security
Offenses
Organized crime
Political Science
Recovery
Scrutiny
Wealth
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Summary:The policy and practice of confiscating criminal assets to control crime and recover illicit wealth has come to occupy a central position in national and international policing and security agendas. However, this practice has raised many questions about agencies’ abilities to measure success and also the social impacts of asset confiscation. This article contributes to the crime control debates by exploring contemporary literature and drawing upon a subset of data from the Joint Asset Recovery Database (JARD). The first part of the article briefly outlines the key legislative provisions of asset recovery in the UK. The second part explores what the JARD data tells us about the performance of the confiscation of proceeds of crime approach and it will argue that seizing illicit wealth has not been the main priority for government. It will argue instead that the proceeds of crime approach, originally designed to target the most serious and organised crime, has effectively become a disciplining and symbolic tool against relatively lower level acquisitive crimes. It concludes that while technical measures of impact remain inconclusive, it is more important to subject the ideological underpinnings of the proceeds of crime law to critical scrutiny.
ISSN:0928-1371
1572-9869
DOI:10.1007/s10610-019-09423-5