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

Greife, Matthew J.; Maume, Michael O.

doi:10.1177/1043986220931631

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…One of the principal obstacles to conducting empirical research on IWT is the dearth—and poor quality—of publicly available data on waste crimes, illegal waste shipments, the prices that are charged on the illegal market as well as on the licit waste market (e.g., production, treatment, import, and export). Many authors and institutions have noted this problem and stressed the need to improve both data collection and data availability within the field of environmental crime to aid future research (Bisschop, 2012; Gibbs & Simpson, 2009; Greife & Maume, 2020; Stassen & Ceccato, 2020). However, more recently, Nobles (2019) has argued that this aforesaid point about the lack of suitable data sets has been overstated, and that in fact there are a variety of secondary data readily accessible through which to investigate many aspects of different justice systems’ responses to environmental crimes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Global Waste Trafficking and Its Correlates

Favarin

Aziani

2020

Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice

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Our understanding of illicit waste trafficking (IWT) is in its embryonic stages; most notably, the transnational nature of this phenomenon has hitherto been neglected in extant empirical research. This study provides the first analysis of the possible coorrelates of transnational IWT at a global level. Through recourse to information extracted from the official Basel Convention National Reports, we constructed a network of the most relevant IWT connections between 148 countries. Next, we quantitatively investigated the role of specific potential factors that influence the structure of this transnational network. Our results indicate that illicit waste is trafficked toward poorer and more insecure countries, primarily via former colonial connections. As such, IWT poses a direct threat to the sustainable development of these countries. Mere adherence to international treaties and promulgation of environmental laws does not in and of themselves explain whether a country is part of the global IWT network, although the establishment of dedicated courts and tribunals does reduce the risk of being a recipient of trafficked waste. Solid anticorruption measures and a strong rule of law increased the likelihood of being a source country in the IWT network, which, in turn, calls for a more global approach to the management of environmental issues.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Global Waste Trafficking and Its Correlates

Favarin

Aziani

2020

Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice

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“…The seventh article emphasizes the importance of being creative when extracting data to study corporate environmental crimes. To this end, the authors document the attempts made by researchers to create broader data sets for corporate environmental crime analysis, with the hope that this will assist those researchers working to create useful bodies of data for analysis (Greife & Maume, 2020).…”

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confidence: 99%

New Methods to Enhance the Study of Environmental Crimes and New Instruments to Strengthen Crime Prevention

Favarin¹

2020

Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice

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Illegal trade in wildlife, illegal logging and timber trading, unregulated fishing, illegal coral harvesting, as well as the illicit trade of waste and smuggling of ozone-depleting substances are, along with other environmental crimes, detrimentally affecting the quality of air, water, and soil, threatening the survival of fauna and flora, causing irreparable damage to our planet, along with placing a heavy burden on both human health and the economic livelihood of billions of people across the globe. However, despite the nascent global awareness of environmental crimes, this area of scientific inquiry requires further investigation by means of rigorous methods to produce sound empirical knowledge that can inform law enforcement activities and criminal justice systems, and advise policy makers. More specifically, several scholars have highlighted the need to produce new solid empirical research on environmental crimes, and recommended utilizing quantitative methods that have hitherto been neglected in this field (Lynch et al., 2017; Lynch & Pires, 2019; Nobles, 2019). The special issue New Quantitative and Qualitative Methods to Investigate Environmental Crimes seeks to improve extant understanding of environmental crimes, advocate for the use of new methods through which to study this topic, and enhance the preventive measures to combat these crimes. I am pleased to introduce this special issue that comprises expert contributions from multiple countries (i.e., Australia, Italy, Sweden, the United States, and the United Kingdom). The articles included in this issue employ different methodological approaches (i.e., quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods) to analyze several types of environmental crime in different offline and online contexts around the world (e.g., the illegal harvesting of live corals in Indonesia and Fiji, environmental crimes in protected areas in Cambodia, online illegal trade in endangered plants, and illicit waste trafficking at the global level). Moreover, they present innovative methodological solutions to the study of environmental crimes and guide future researchers in how to construct databases to quantitatively investigate corporate environmental crimes. The first article in this special issue introduces the use of counter-mapping and activist tools as both a new method through which to investigate environmental crimes and as a means to quantify and demonstrate environmental harm in Australia (Barnes & White, 2020). The second article applies risk terrain modeling (RTM) to study fauna and flora-related illegal activities (e.g., illegal logging, flora and fauna poaching) in 939705C CJXXX10.

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The deterrence effect of criminal sanctions against environmental crime in Finland: an application of the rational choice model of crime

Lindqvist,

Lombardini,

Suvantola

et al. 2024

Eur J Law Econ

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Applying the rational choice model of crime, this study estimates the optimality of sanctions for environmental crimes, the social cost of these crimes and the expected gain to the offender with Finnish court data from 327 criminal cases in the period 2013–2018. Sensitivity analyses are conducted for the optimal fine, the expected gain from the crime and its social cost. The time-lag and uncertainties related to the restoration of the environmental harm are explicitly included in the model and the empirical analysis. The average fine was much lower than the optimal fine even when taking into account the constraint posed by the offenders’ wealth and disregarding the time-lag and uncertainties related to the restoration of the environmental harm. The use of prison sentences was also suboptimal. Even when the illegal gain was fully forfeited, the expected gain from the crime to the offender remained positive. Our results suggest a need to increase the cost of punishment by higher fines and reliable forfeiture of the illegal economic gain. They also point to the importance of systematically estimating both the environmental damage and the illegal gain from the crime as these were available respectively for only 24% (N = 79) and 3% (N = 11) of all cases.

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

Cited by 5 publications

References 55 publications

The Global Waste Trafficking and Its Correlates

The Global Waste Trafficking and Its Correlates

New Methods to Enhance the Study of Environmental Crimes and New Instruments to Strengthen Crime Prevention

The deterrence effect of criminal sanctions against environmental crime in Finland: an application of the rational choice model of crime

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