Criminal law and criminology: a survey of recent books.

• Author: Ferrall, Bard R.

ASSET SEIZURE

R. T. NAYLOR, WAGES OF CRIME: BLACK MARKETS, ILLEGAL FINANCE, AND THE UNDERWORLD ECONOMY (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2002) 336pp

The success of the policy of controlling crime by pursuing its proceeds remains unproven, the author argues. The author also finds several social harms of the policy, including a distortion of law enforcement priorities, the reduction of an individual's defense against arbitrary official action when the government is allowed to pursue punitive measures while satisfying only a civil burden of proof, and the corruption engendered by the use of "sting" operations. Notions of worldwide cartels controlling and manipulating vast sums of illegally gained sums do not reflect the evidence as examined by the author, and probably are the result of hyperbolic statements from government officials, widely repeated in the media, based on sensational but atypical examples. The alternative image, that most crime is committed by single or loosely-organized individuals who quickly dissipate the proceeds rather than hoarding them into large accumulations of capital, may be more realistic but does not capture the public imagination. Market based offenses differ significantly from predatory crime; the latter involves wealth taken from the victim through force or fraud, rather than a mutually agreed upon exchange of wealth for value. Market-based offenses are driven by demand; in a mutually agreed-upon transfer, wealth is exchanged for value. Investigation of predatory crime begins with the victim's complaint. Market-based offenses rarely if ever have such a victim complaint, so law enforcement must proceed on its own initiative. Selection of targets can become arbitrary, capricious or even abusive. Applying the predatory crime model, and the corresponding law enforcement mindset, to market-based offenses has resulted in the error of imposing a supply-side solution to demand driven problems. History has no example of a successful defeat of a black market by supply-side controls; the author argues the present policy is another such failure, and proposes, as an alternative, applying a reverse burden of proof in the tax law, whereby expenditures exceeding reported income are presumed to be unreported income. Even though the unreported income would be taxed only at the marginal rate, the accompanying fines for failure to report would dry up most of the criminal proceeds. This would remove the incentive for most market-based crime, while avoiding the problems of tracing proceeds to a particular crime.

BIAS MOTIVATED CRIME

JEANNINE BELL, POLICING HATRED: LAW ENFORCEMENT, CIVIL RIGHTS, AND HATE CRIME (New York, New York University Press, 2002) 227pp

Police construct the meaning of a particular incident or occurrence by the ways they investigate it. Police are constructing an incident as a hate crime if they investigate it as such. Conversely, they are constructing an incident as something other than a hate crime if they do not investigate it as such. While an incident investigated and charged as a hate crime may ultimately not...