This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, April 5, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When the government seizes your property as having been used in a crime or proceeds from criminal behavior,

shouldn't you have at least been convicted of... or proceeds from criminal behavior,

shouldn't you have at least been convicted of something?

Welcome to the world of civil asset forfeiture,

where authorities take your property

without charging you with or convicting you of anything, and then using the proceeds to boost their

budgets. Scott Bullock is co-author of the new Institute for Justice Report, policing for profit,

the abuse of civil asset forfeiture.

We spoke last week.

When I was a reporter talking to the police,

they treated a lot of their activities

as very procedural by the book as if they were not being influenced in any way by incentives that existed around them.

And of course it's ridiculous to assume that police departments do not make

choices about which laws to enforce fervently and which laws to sort of not worry about so much.

Absolutely. Everyone responds to incentives and government officials and

police officers and prosecutors are no different from anyone else and if the

the incentives are bad or are misguided,

then it should not be surprising that those officials

respond accordingly.

And when you give police and prosecutors, as so many states and the federal government do, a profit

...