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.

没收犯罪资产以控制犯罪和追回非法财富的政策和做法已在国家和国际警务和安全议程中占据中心位置。然而，这种做法对机构衡量成功的能力以及资产没收的社会影响提出了许多问题。本文通过探索当代文献并利用联合资产追回数据库 (JARD) 中的数据子集，为犯罪控制辩论做出贡献。文章的第一部分简要概述了英国资产追回的主要立法规定。第二部分探讨 JARD 数据告诉我们关于没收犯罪所得方法的表现的内容，并将论证没收非法财富并不是政府的主要优先事项。相反，它会争辩说，最初旨在针对最严重和有组织的犯罪的犯罪收益方法已有效地成为打击相对较低级别的获得性犯罪的纪律和象征性工具。它的结论是，虽然影响的技术措施仍然没有定论，但更重要的是对犯罪所得法的意识形态基础进行严格审查。