Stealing Like Artists: Using Court Records to Conduct Quantitative Research on Corporate Environmental Crimes

• Published date: 01 August 2020
• Date: 01 August 2020
• Author: Michael O. Maume,Matthew J. Greife
• DOI: 10.1177/1043986220931631
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1043986220931631

Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice

2020, Vol. 36(3) 451 –469

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/1043986220931631

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Article

Stealing Like Artists: Using

Court Records to Conduct

Quantitative Research on

Corporate Environmental

Crimes

Matthew J. Greife1 and Michael O. Maume2

Abstract

A major challenge in conducting quantitative analyses in the field of corporate

environmental crime is the lack of a readily accessible data set. At least in the United

States, currently the best available datasets regarding environmental crime generally

are produced and disseminated by government agencies like the Environmental

Protection Agency (“EPA”). However, these datasets have multiple limitations that

force researchers to “scour” through the informational landscape for other primary

and secondary sources to conduct more robust quantitative analyses. In this article,

we document the attempts researchers have made to create broader datasets for

corporate environmental crime analysis, with the hope that it will assist researchers

working to create useful bodies of data for analysis.

Keywords

corporate crime, green criminology, environmental crime

Criminologists studying criminal offenses against the environment have produced a

sizable research literature over the previous several decades. Although some have

argued that the heyday for such research peaked in the 1970s (Dabney, 2016; Snider,

2003), others have argued that the research is still in its infancy (Burns & Lynch, 2004;

Rebovich, 1998). We suggest that recent developments in the availability of data and

1Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

2University of North Carolina Wilmington, NC, USA

Corresponding Author:

Michael O. Maume, Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of North Carolina

Wilmington, 601 S College Road, Wilmington, NC 28403, USA.

Email: maume@uncw.edu

931631CCJXXX10.1177/1043986220931631Journal of Contemporary Criminal JusticeGreife and Maume

research-article2020

452 Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 36(3)

methodological techniques provide the potential for criminologists to reinvigorate

such research efforts. In her recent address to the American Society of Criminology,

(ASC) president Sally Simpson (2019) assessed where criminology stands with regard

to white-collar crime studies 80 years after Sutherland’s presidential address. Among

other issues, she notes that

[b]ecause systematic counts and measures of business crimes still do not exist, the process

of creating an offending database is, even now, labor intensive. Researchers must scour

criminal, civil, and regulatory documents to match firms with reports of wrongdoing

across a variety of different offense types. (Simpson, 2019, p. 193)

The purpose of this article is to assist criminologists interested in “scouring” court

records to conduct quantitative research on corporate environmental crimes (CECs),

while acknowledging the learning curve required for criminologists new to data on

environmental violations (Gibbs & Simpson, 2009), legal research (Nolasco et al.,

2010), and the complex structural context of U.S. firms (Fligstein & Roehrkasse,

2016; Prechel & Zheng, 2016). Our article also addresses those seeking to answer a

recently expressed call for more quantitative research under the auspices of “green”

criminology (M. J. Lynch et al., 2017).

Although such efforts could apply to crimes of the powerful in a number of domains,

we take a particular interest in CECs for two reasons. First, the costs of such crimes—

although inestimable on the whole—are likely to be enormous, given the cost esti-

mates on individual cases such as the Deepwater Horizon explosion and the resultant

oil spill, which resulted in the loss of numerous lives (both human and non-human),

income, and billions in cleanup costs (Cohen, 2016). In addition, as Cohen (2016)

notes, such crimes are likely to have very large intangible costs that “may never be

monetized” (p. 95). The cost of CECs and other corporate crimes such as antitrust

frauds outweigh not only street crimes but other white-collar offenses. It is difficult to

reconcile these costs against the continued absence of a national database to address

such crimes (Shover & Routhe, 2005). There is thus a clear imperative to understand

and address such CECs. Second, the harms resulting from CECs are expected to con-

tinue as the “treadmill of production” runs apace under current economic regimes

(Stretesky et al., 2014). Such green crimes are to be expected as commodities are

extracted from the environment and such extraction in turn causes further ecological

harms. Green criminologists have called not only for more attention to be paid to

CECs, but their regulation and enforcement as well (Cochran et al., 2018; Greife et al.,

2017; Ozymy & Jarrell, 2015; Stretesky et al., 2014).

Efforts to Compile CEC Data

Our focus here is limited to environmental crimes involving corporate offenders

accused of violating U.S. federal laws designed to protect the environment.1 We focus

on federal-level data because most of the efforts to compile CEC data come from fed-

eral prosecutions rather than state prosecutions. The Environmental Protection Agency