RT Article
T1 Dirty money and financial inequality in North Philadelphia
JF Theoretical criminology
VO 28
IS 1
SP 50
OP 69
A1 Smith, Jackson
LA English
YR 2024
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1880021374
AB Between 1984 and 2016, Philadelphia prosecutors seized over USUSD86 million dollars, most of it in the form of cash taken from Black and Latinx Philadelphians. These seizures of dirty money were realized through civil forfeiture, which has the unique capacity to enrich municipal law enforcement agencies while dispossessing alleged participants in the drug trade. As a civil intervention into the illicit narcotics trade, cash forfeiture is characteristic of the carceral state's increasing use of non-criminal sanctions. In this essay I argue that Philadelphia police and prosecutors mobilize cash forfeiture to assert social control over the interfaces between licit and illicit economies in Philadelphia's poorest and most racially segregated neighborhoods. Drawing from historical accounts of the racial capitalist state's disciplinary oversight of the monetary system, I show how cash forfeiture operates through a racializing framework of socio-moral remediation that reproduces the harms associated with longstanding financial inequality in these neighborhoods.
K1 War on drugs
K1 Urban
K1 Racialization
K1 race and class
K1 Policing
K1 Inequality
K1 historical perspectives
K1 Drugs
K1 Capitalism
DO 10.1177/13624806231162608