We analyze judicial policy lines concerning the punishment of environmental crime using a unique European dataset of individual criminal cases, including case-specific information on offenses and offenders. We investigate policy choices made by lower criminal courts, as well as their follow-up by the relevant court of appeal. The sanctioning policy of the courts has proven to be varied as well as consistent. Judges carefully balance effective and suspended penalties, most often using them cumulatively, but in specific cases opting to use them as substitutes. Overall, both judges in lower and appeal courts balance environmental law and classic criminal law and aim at protecting individuals and their possessions as well as the environment.

In this contribution, we investigate whether prison sentences for environmental crime are indeed used in practice, how they are used and whether they imply a real threat to violators. To this end we examine previous studies on the role of imprisonment and confront these models with some empirical data. The empirical application summarizes evidence from several countries, but focuses on detailed data for criminal prosecution of environmental legislation in Flanders (Belgium) between 2003 and 2007. Thus we are able to highlight some interesting policy issues and directions for future research.

We conduct a counterfactual analysis to measure the treatment difference between administrative and criminal enforcement of environmental violations. Our aim is to control for the selection bias effect and make a comparison of how similar offenses are treated in both enforcement tracks. This analysis is relevant to answer the question of how deterrence and welfare in a combined criminal-administrative enforcement system compare with an enforcement system relying on criminal penalization only. This is an important question given the observed shift towards two-track penalization systems, combining administrative and criminal penalization, for environmental enforcement in the European Union. We apply matching techniques on a unique dataset of environmental enforcement cases to control for sample selection bias. We match different enforcement cases, based on case characteristics and estimate the average treatment effect for these cases. Overall, we find that the marginal penalty is slightly lower in administrative enforcement compared to criminal enforcement

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The development of the criminal sanctioning track in the EU is a prominent policy issue. Previous studies of the actual use of criminal sanctions in the member states are very important since the gap between the law and practice can be very wide. Policy makers and law enforcers are confronted with a lack of empirical data on the actual use of criminal law to sanction environmental offenses. In this study, we use information stored in the Environmental LawForce database, which is a database of environmental sanctioning by criminal courts in Flanders, Belgium. The study distinguishes three types of offenders: companies, individuals prosecuted for acts committed as part of their professional activities, and individuals prosecuted for acts committed as part of their private lives. Based on previous theoretical insights, we investigate when we expect the environmental sanctions to be similar or different across the three groups of offenders. In particular, we assess the differences and similarities across the sanctioning of environmental offenses committed by companies, professional individuals and private individuals in Flanders.