Reward
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
in a legal sense, some encouragement which the law holds out for exertions in bringing certain classes of criminals to justice. The courts of assize may order the sheriff of the county, in which certain offenses have been committed, to pay to persons who have been active in securing the apprehension of offenders charged with crimes, or with being accessory before the fact to any inhere to receiving any stolen property, a reasonable sum to compensate them for expense, exertion, and loss of time. So by a later statute courts of quarter sessions are authorized, in the case of any of the above offenses which they have jurisdiction to try, to order such compensation; but the payment to one person must not exceed $25. If any one is killed in endeavoring to apprehend a person charged with one of these offenses, the court may order compensation to be made to the family. The amount to be paid in all such cases is subject to regulations which may be made from time to time by the Secretary of State. By another statute it is a felony, punishable by penal servitude to the extent of seven years, to corruptly take any reward for helping a person to property stolen or embezzled, unless all due diligence to bring the offenders to trial has been used. In Great Britain an advertisement offering a reward for the return of stolen or lost property, using words purporting that no questions will be asked or inquiry made after the person producing the property, renders the advertiser, printer, and publisher liable to forfeit $250. The offering of rewards by the government has in England been discontinued on grounds of public policy. In the World War, however, the British Government offered rewards for the apprehension of dangerous enemy spies and others.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's in 1921 described reward mainly as a payment a court might order a sheriff to make to private citizens who helped catch a felon, capped at the equivalent of $25, and noted that the British government had stopped offering rewards "on grounds of public policy." Those court-ordered allowances to prosecutors and captors are gone, replaced by public prosecution services and by state-funded costs in criminal cases. Governments now openly advertise huge bounties instead: the U.S. State Department's Rewards for Justice programme, created in 1984, has offered sums up to $25 million, and whistleblower schemes such as the IRS award programme (2006) and the SEC programme under the Dodd-Frank Act (2010) pay informants a percentage of money recovered, sometimes tens of millions of dollars. One rule Collier's mentions does survive: in England it remains an offence to advertise a reward for the return of stolen goods promising that "no questions will be asked," now under section 23 of the Theft Act 1968.
Written for this edition, 2026.