Corporate Environmental Crime and Environmental Justice

• Author: Paul B. Stretesky,Matthew Greife,Mark Pogrebin,Tara O’Connor Shelley
• DOI: 10.1177/0887403415576742
• Published date: 01 May 2017
• Date: 01 May 2017

Criminal Justice Policy Review

2017, Vol. 28(4) 327 –346

© The Author(s) 2015

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DOI: 10.1177/0887403415576742

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Article

Corporate Environmental

Crime and Environmental

Justice

Matthew Greife1, Paul B. Stretesky2,

Tara O’Connor Shelley3, and Mark Pogrebin4

Abstract

Executive Order 12898 (42 U.S.C. § 4321 [2000]) mandates that federal agencies

in the United States make it their purpose to achieve environmental justice. As a

result, agencies often rely on empirical studies to provide crucial information that

can be used to implement policies to combat inequality. Although numerous studies

now examine the distribution of environmental burdens and benefits, there are

no systematic empirical studies that examine inequality in criminal penalties. This

study corrects that omission by presenting findings on the relationship between

community demographics and monetary penalties against corporations for 121

criminal violations of federal environmental law that were adjudicated between the

years 2005 and 2010. Our results suggest that monetary penalties are not correlated

with the demographics of residents living near the crime. That is, corporations that

committed their environmental crimes in minority and poor areas did not receive

lower monetary penalties as a result. Thus, environmental justice concerns appear to

be satisfied with respect to federal criminal prosecutions.

Keywords

punishment, sentencing, environmental crime, environmental justice, corporate crime

Introduction

In 1990, Michael Lynch suggested that “a green criminology” should be at the center

of the discipline’s development. Within this new green criminology, environmental

1The University of Georgia, Athens, USA

2Northumbria University, New Castle upon Tyne, UK

3Colorado State University, Fort Collins, USA

4University of Colorado Denver, USA

Corresponding Author:

Matthew Greife, Department of Sociology, The University of Georgia, 113 Baldwin Hall, Athens, GA

30602, USA.

Email: mgreife@uga.edu

576742CJPXXX10.1177/0887403415576742Criminal Justice Policy ReviewGreife et al.

research-article2015

328 Criminal Justice Policy Review 28(4)

justice is a central concept (Stretesky, 2008). White (2008, p. 50), for instance, elabo-

rates that green criminology must emphasize “environmental justice with a special

focus on human rights, social equity and ecological justice.” Whether one is using an

environmental justice perspective or some other perspective such as ecological justice

to inform their research, most green criminologists now study a range of environmen-

tal harms some of which are legal and/or illegal (White, 2013; White & Heckenberg,

2014). This study extends the green criminology tradition by focusing on environmen-

tal justice concerns identified in Executive Order 12898 (42 U.S.C. § 4321 [2000]),

which mandates that federal policies should encourage the “fair treatment and mean-

ingful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income

with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental

laws, regulations, and policies.”1 Specifically, we examine whether the composition of

race/ethnicity and/or poverty of communities surrounding environmental violations is

inversely correlated with the monetary penalties assessed by the federal government

for those violations. If penalties are, on average, lower in communities that are minor-

ity and/or poor, then national polices may need to be adopted to tackle that problem.

The current study is focused specifically on illegal behavior; however, green crimi-

nologists adopt a framework for studying environmental harm that is inclusive and

often examines both criminal and non-criminal behavior (Stretesky & Lynch, 2003).

This approach is advantageous, and studying the adverse effects of legal and illegal

actions is nothing new in the discipline. That is, criminologists and legal researchers

often study activities that are considered legal and legitimate, but nonetheless have

detrimental impacts on people and environments (Hillyard & Tombs, 2007; Sutherland,

1949; White, 2003). The emphasis green criminologists place on studying both legal

and illegal activities is most easily recognized as advantageous within the real-world

applications of environmental law. For instance, in United States v. White (1991) the

testimony from the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) assistant administrator

emphasizes that the definition of environmental hazards is constantly changing as the

Agency modifies its administrative rules. Therefore, a flexible conceptual framework

like green criminology is necessary to study the full array of environmental harms that

may fluctuate between criminal and non-criminal behavior over time and place (Long,

Stretesky, Lynch and Fenwick, 2012).

Furthermore, a green criminology framework is advantageous because it allows

researchers to use traditional criminological theories and/or draw upon theories from

other fields, such as environmental sociology, when analyzing crimes against the envi-

ronment (Stretesky, Long, & Lynch, 2014).2 Although environmental justice is not

nested within a traditional criminological theory, it is highly relevant for this study

since prosecutors are explicitly mandated by executive order 12898 (42 U.S.C. § 4321

[2000]) to take environmental justice considerations into account when prosecuting

individuals and corporations for violation of environmental criminal laws (Dighe &

Pettus, 2011; Stretesky et al., 2014; White, 2013). As such, we examine hypotheses

derived from an environmental justice perspective to analyze the outcomes of 121 plea

bargains3 obtained via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) from the U.S. Department

of Justice (DOJ) between the years 2005 and 2010 against corporations that were pros-

ecuted for environmental crime.4