Confiscation

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Confiscation, from the Latin confiscatio 'joining to the fiscus, i.e. transfer to the treasury' is a legal seizure without compensation by a government or other public authority.

As a punishment, it differs from a fine in that it is not primarily meant to match the crime but rather reattributes the criminal's ill-gotten spoils (often as a complement to the actual punishment for the crime itself; still common with various kinds of contraband, such as protected living organisms) to the community or even aims to rob him of his socio-economic status, in the extreme case reducing him to utter poverty, or if he is condemned to death even denies his inheritance to the legal heirs, thus punishing the entire bloodline (in the primitive logic of the blood feud). Meanwhile limited confiscation is often in function of the crime, the rationale being that the criminal must be denied the fruits of his fault, while the crime itself is rather punished in some other, independent way, such as physical punishments or even a concurring fine.

Such rich prizes often proved too much temptation for the authorities to refrain from abuse out of greed, especially when taxation was relatively low-yielding, not permanent (often requiring assent from estates etc. at a political cost) and aroused far more resistance then 'making criminals pay'.

For legal confiscation in the United States, see search and seizure.Template:Law-stub

cs:Konfiskace da:Konfiskation de:Konfiskation ja:没収 pt:Confiscação sv:Konfiskation zh:沒收

This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at Confiscation. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with the MarijuanaWiki, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.