A few years ago, I was complaining about what I called “profitable punishment” — any type of criminal or administrative punishment that makes money for the government imposing it. The ostensible purpose of imposing punishment for crimes is to discourage people from committing crimes, but when municipalities and police departments can enrich themselves with fines and forfeitures, it distorts the criminal justice system:
[Profitable punishment] provides a much greater incentive for unnecessary criminal laws. But even when fines are used to punish genuine crimes, they also provide a perverse incentive to not actually reduce the amount of bad behavior. When a city is spending a million dollars a year running a batch of red-light cameras, the last thing they want is for everyone to drive safely.
As Radley Balko points out in his recent HuffPo piece on proposed changes in Tennessee asset forfeiture law, the ill effects of profitable punishment have perverted drug enforcement:
That can create some odd incentives. For example, in a 2011 report, Nashville’s News Channel 5 found that the vast majority of police stops looking for suspected drug smugglers were made on the side of the highway leaving the city, not the side entering it. For police coffers, it was better to let the drugs come into Nashville, be sold and then seize the cash as the dealers left town.
Likewise, in a 1994 study published in the journal Justice Quarterly, criminologists J. Mitchell Miller and Lance H. Selva found that several police agencies delayed making busts of suspected drug houses until most of the drug supply had been sold. They waited until the drugs had already hit the streets so that they could maximize their forfeiture bounty.
In other words, police have perverted their anti-drug enforcement policy so that illegal drug dealing has become a source of revenue for the department.
I’ve complained in the past that forfeiture laws turn police departments into auto theft rings and pirates. My guess is that if anyone other than a police department deliberately allowed drug deals to take place and then took money from the drug dealers, prosecutors would hold press conferences and call them “drug kingpins.”
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