Starting from a critical reading of Foucault, this article analyses an early text by Marx where the penalization of the theft of dead wood resonates with the transformation of property law, with the production of new forms of illegalism and with the transformation of civil society. It reinterprets patrimony as an “artificial judicial body”, in order to shed light on today’s mass incarceration, viewed as a means of control towards pauperized populations characterized by their “empty patrimony”.