The Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 changed the way in which crimes which are thought to have generated financial gain are prosecuted. As a result, such offences are prosecuted under criminal law as they normally would, with a punishment which is supposed to be proportionate to the gravity of the offence, but this punishment is then followed up with an additional court process which leads to the imposition of a confiscation order based upon the court’s assumed calculation of ‘benefit’, and the subsequent confiscation of any assets within that value. In this article, Craig Fletcher and Becky Clarke begin to expose the lived reality of both the confiscation court process, and how this additional form of punishment is experienced, enabling you to begin to understand the significant gap between confiscation ideology and its lived reality.