Dirty money and financial inequality in North Philadelphia

Abstract

Between 1984 and 2016, Philadelphia prosecutors seized over US$86 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.