This is a good explanation of things, but scapegoating "fiscal conservatives" for reducing budgets seems disingenuous, and deflects blame from those responsible (IE, the police, DAs, judges, and legislators who allow this travesty to continue). Choosing to spend less on a government function cannot be allowed the impression of excusing this behavior.
Fiscal conservatives are what brought the practice back in the context of the drug war, and their budget constraints are a large part of what expanded the practice beyond the drug war and into wink-wink-I-smell-pot-in-this-BMW territory. They're not the only guilty ones - Democrats generally went along with it, like the rest of the drug war, for fear of being painted as weak on crime, but they're not the architects. The phenomenon of state governments which perpetually run deficits, cutting more every year, is not their vice.
" I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub. "
- Grover Norquist, possessor of a signed loyalty oath from much of the Republican Party towards the goal of ritual opposition to new taxes
" It's now possible for a drug dealer to serve time in a forfeiture-financed prison after being arrested by agents driving a forfeiture-provided automobile while working in a forfeiture-funded sting operation. "
— Reagan attorney general Richard Thornburgh in 1989.
This is implicitly corrupting and, again, explicitly unconstitutional. The historical civil forfeiture was used in British Naval law to seize assets of overseas fugitives before charging them; It was one of the reasons the US rebelled. Stealing cash from one's pocket because one is carrying cash and this is inherently suspicious, without charges when given every opportunity to arrest, has never been historically acceptable.
