Government extractions of assets through forfeiture remain an increasingly contested topic. Asset forfeitures are often significant for people entangled with the criminal justice system. Helping complicate motivations for forfeitures include the financial implications for federal, state, and local governments that generate revenue from forfeitures.
While governmental forfeiture continues to receive scholarly attention, much of the attention lacks data. However, a recent paper, Asset Forfeiture and Inequality, by Stephanie Holmes Didwania (Northwestern), explores forfeitures with the benefit of Department of Justice data on roughly 1.2 million federal asset forfeitures between 1998 and 2019 which are matched to county-level population data over that period. The paper's main take-away involves the claim that governments use asset forfeiture in ways that exacerbate inequality. An excerpted abstract follows.
“… Asset forfeiture also is a crucial way that federal, state, and local governments generate revenue from criminal investigation and prosecution. In the federal system, the government’s acquisition of forfeited assets (such as cash, electronics, cars, and homes) brings in around $2 billion in annual revenue. Every year, the federal government transfers hundreds of millions of these dollars to state and local law enforcement agencies, making asset forfeiture a lucrative federal-state enterprise.
This Article makes three contributions. First, it provides the first scholarly examination of how the federal government has engaged in asset forfeiture by using comprehensive data of the Department of Justice’s roughly 1.2 million federal asset forfeitures between 1998 and 2019 matched to county-level population data over that period.
Second, this empirical analysis reveals inequality in the government’s use of asset forfeiture. Specifically, the government more actively engages in revenue-generating forfeitures in districts with larger Black and Hispanic populations. This disparity is partly driven by the government’s extensive use of forfeiture in the districts that border Mexico—a phenomenon the literature has not yet recognized. The same disparity is not present in forfeitures that do not generate revenue. Forfeiture thus resembles a practice by which governments derive revenue from fines and fees in ways that unfairly burdens poor communities of color.“