[Video Link] The US Department of Justice and police in Massachusetts have decided to confiscate a $1,000,000 motel from a family that has owned and operated it for two generations, because 0.0005%* of the guests have been arrested over the past 20 years. The police department and the Department of Justice will split the proceeds of the sale of the property and leave the owners — who have never been charged with a crime — with nothing.

Imagine you own a million-dollar piece of property free and clear, but then the federal government and local law enforcement agents announce that they are going to take it from you, not compensate you one dime, and then use the money they get from selling your land to pad their budgets—all this even though you have never so much as been accused of a crime, let alone convicted of one.

Abuse of civil forfeiture laws to pad the budgets of police and prosecutors is in the rise in all 50 states in the US. Above, a graph comparing the civil forfeiture fund when the program started in 1986 ($94 million) and in 2010 ($1.6 billion).

The Institute for Justice is fighting to stop it. Find out more.

*UPDATE: This percentage doesn't add up. A person who wishes to remain anonymous emailed me the following:

"0.0005% of a number is 0.000005, or 5×10^-6. >125,000 rooms times 5×10^-6 is >0.625 rooms, which means that there is either a spare zero somewhere in the IJ article, or the police are trying to seize the motel because there was an arrest of five-eighths of the occupants of a single room. I'm inclined to think that there's a spare zero in the IJ article, which would bring the number of rooms up to 6.25, a more sensible number."

It's also possible that there are two spare zeroes (because people often confuse percentages and decimal numbers).