This report may do much to reduce malpractices in the business world. Its central recommendation would considerably strengthen the courts’ hand against commercial and insurance fraud and all acquisitive crime. Set up by the Howard League for Penal Reform to investigate the weakness exposed by the Operation Julie case (R. v. Cuthbertson [1981] A.C. 470), the committee proposes that, above a limit to be fixed, the Crown Court should have power to confiscate the profits of crime, and that powers of forfeiture in relation to property put to criminal purposes should be strengthened. But the report is weakened by its breadth. The committee construed its terms of reference as extending to victim-compensation generally and therefore has much to say which is relevant to injury and loss no less than to criminal profits. Its analysis is also too hurried. Compensation, restitution, forfeiture, and confiscation are its principal terms, but others, such as fines, penalties and proprietary orders, inevitably enter in, a plurality insufficiently stabilized and sometimes bewildering.

The crucial recommendation for confiscating profits is itself marred, as some may think, by the suggestion that the courts should be drawn into an unseemly accounting exercise to make sure they do not take too much. “If drug traffickers have paid their suppliers, confiscation of the gross proceeds would go no further than would be necessary to put them in the same position as if they had not offended” (p. 75). It is difficult to see why a wrongdoer suffering confiscation should not automatically forfeit his expenses: nemo suam turpitudinem allegans audiendus est. There is also cause for anxiety in the paragraphs on confiscation from third party recipients (pp. 125–126). Loose analogies with civil “tracing” are unhelpful. It is clear that the committee aims to exempt bona fide purchasers and to relieve bona fide donees. But it is not clear whether other recipients are to be liable in money for what they received or only specifically for what they still hold, if anything.

With a broad brush, profitable crimes can be said to have or not to have identifiable victims. Breaches of conservation and planning laws do not. Manufacturers and wholesalers of illegal drugs harm thousands but take their profit from an anonymous market. Pornographers similarly. On the other hand, theft and related offences generally do have identifiable victims. The victim-less case is easier in that only confiscation and punishment compete, compensation and restitution being out of the question. Arguably, confiscation of profits never lawfully earned ought to go on absolutely separate from punishment, albeit to the advantage of the spendthrift criminal already penniless again when caught. But the committee comes down the other way and says confiscation, and especially co-operation in the disgorgement procedure, should be a factor reducing imprisonment (p. 136). Scepticism as to the value of imprisonment is, anyway, a thread which runs through the report.

Where the crime does have a victim, issues of compensation and restitution—barely worth distinguishing in the committee’s understanding of the latter—inevitably