Property Seizure Effectiveness in the Context of Official Statistics

Abstract

In 2003, the legislator decided to exclude the seizure of property from the realm of criminal law, which scientists assessed rather critically. Almost two decades later, despite the problems in the field of combating acquisitive crime, there have been no adjustments to this decision in essence. The paper determines the preventive potential of property seizure as a measure of punishment (in the form in which it existed before the exclusion) based on the analysis of data from the Judicial Department under the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation for the period from 2004 to 2020. This data includes the number of those convicted of crimes subject to seizure until 2003, as well as the proportion of convicts on these offenses in comparison with the bodies of crimes without classifying elements. The study resulted in that the hypothesis that property seizure, as an independent type of punishment, was effective, its abolition led to a significant loss of the preventive potential of the sanction, and imposition of a punishment that did not correspond to the nature and degree of social danger did not find its confirmation. Consequently, the argument that property seizure had a significant preventive potential that was lost after the 2003 legislative adjustment, at least in relation to crimes against property and banditry, is quite debatable. The effectiveness of this measure of punishment was significantly reduced by its additional and optional nature. It seems justified to correct the criminal law in terms of the introduction of imprisonment as the main punishment for bribery.