We live in an age of environmental crises and corporate irresponsibility. Climate change awareness is on the rise, and several industries have adapted to the new eco-friendly regulations put in place by international committees. However, if we look at the main causes of what is making our one and only planet decay; we do not have to look any further than the corporate giants.
While public discourse has shifted towards climate action, the role of corporate giants in perpetuating pollution is often sidelined; environmental crimes committed by the companies that shall not be named are the elephant in the room in mainstream media.
We seem to forget that environmental crime is still a crime, with the legal consequence of a punishment. Except that, somehow, this punishment for the corporate giants does not seem to come.
This absence of accountability becomes even more alarming when we consider the evidence of climate change visible across the globe. Look no further than the state of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, the October floods in Valencia (Spain), or the wildfires in Southern Europe— it is all the end and the beginning of the domino effect that is climate change. We look at the news, study climate pollution, point fingers at industries that are violating the rules, and then what?
The failure of traditional crime deterrence mechanisms has never been more visible. Despite the wealth and power held by many corporate giants, environmental crimes— ranging from toxic waste disposal to water pollution— continue to devastate ecosystems and vulnerable communities. Scholars like Sutherland (1945) and Lynch (1990) have long argued that white-collar crime, especially in the corporate sector, is shielded by the offenders’ social status and economic power. However, the question remains: why do they rarely face significant penalties, and why are environmental crimes so overlooked in the international criminal justice system?
To understand why environmental crimes persist with little to no punishment, we must delve into the theories and definitions that frame corporate crime within the scope of criminology. In the 1940s, American criminologist Edwin Sutherland proposed the term “white collar crime” to refer to “a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of their occupation” (Sutherland, 1945), and studied how offenders avoided penalties due to their wealth and power.
In 1990, Michael J. Lynch introduced the term “Green Criminology” to explain the study of crimes committed against nature. This term, however, lacks one solid definition, but it was originally defined as “harms caused to living beings through the creation of environmental hazards; outcomes tied to corporate and state crimes” (Lynch, 1990).
According to Lynch (2020), green criminology is similar to Marx’s analysis of how capitalism and nature were intersected, in other words, that capitalism exploits nature’s free resources as well as the working class labor. The offenders in environmental crimes are also often global corporate giants, and several researchers have raised the question of what deterrent measures exist to prevent this type of crime.
Building on these foundational theories, contemporary researchers have started investigating environmental justice and whether environmental pollution is equally distributed across social groups. There is an interest in the ways in which corporate polluters maintain their wealth and power through toxin production, the different types of environmental crimes, and the patterns of environmental victimization related to race, class, and gender. Researchers also argue that nobody defends the minorities when it comes to environmental crimes, since it has been found that toxic waste was located disproportionately in areas where the poor lived, and an increased overexposure to pesticides and toxins could produce aggression, leading to more violence.
Nowadays, corporate crimes against nature (Lynch, 2020) still remain part of white collar crime in the sense that the offender has enough wealth so as not to be intimidated by potential economic fines if they are prosecuted. The main hypothesis for white collar crime prevention is that by increasing the financial penalties exponentially, a rational delinquent will not commit the crime; hereby proving the deterrent effect of the increase of fines. This raises the following question: do financial penalties have a deterrent crime control effect when it comes to environmental crimes?
Research, such as that conducted by Barrett et al. (2018), underscores this failure, illustrating the limited impact of current deterrence strategies. Barrett et al. (2018) examined thirty years of criminal cases, and concluded that “the probability of detection and criminal punishment for an environmental crime was unlikely, casting doubt on the utility of current deterrence-based models for the control of environmental crime” through several cases as examples. The fines showed the most effect when it came to water polluting acts, but the effect was incredibly insignificant on a larger scale, and the fines also showed no deterrent effect when it came to the massive disposal of toxic wastes. Their research also concluded that criminal penalties of any kind do not have a deterrent effect when it comes to massive treadmill production, as the corporate organization prioritizes profit-making and “the expansion of production is valued over environmental compliance” (Barrett et al., 2018).
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
According to criminological theories, it is not the criminal punishment that stop the commission of a crime, but rather the self-perception of being detected that raises individual compliance with the law, as well as the speed of the sanction (Bergman, 1998).
In conclusion, in order to increase the effectiveness of corporate crime control, other preventive methods must be developed since fines are not a deterrent for the higher class, and environmental crime ought to be more investigated since it victimizes not only minorities but all social classes as well.
If we are serious about climate, then a complete rethinking of punishment strategies is long overdue. We need creative and practical deterrents, ones that go beyond money to truly hold the giants accountable. This includes stricter international regulations, increasing reputational/brand damage, and perhaps even developing new frameworks of justice that prioritize our planet over profits. Without such changes, the cycle of harm will continue, leaving both nature and humanity to pay the price.
References
1- Barrett, K. L., Lynch, M. J., Long, M. A., & Stretesky, P. B. (2018). Monetary penalties and noncompliance with environmental laws: a mediation analysis. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 43(3), 530-550.
2- Bergman, M. (1998). Criminal law and tax compliance in Argentina: Testing the limits of deterrence. International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 26(1), 55-74.
3- Lynch, J. M. (1990). The greening of criminology: A perspective on the 1990s. Green Criminology (pp. 165-170). Routledge.
Lynch, M. J. (2020). Green criminology and environmental crime: Criminology that matters in the age of global ecological collapse. Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime, 1(1), 50-61.
4- Lynch, M.J., & Stretesky, P. (2001). Radical criminology. A R. Paternoster & R. Bachman (Eds.), Explaining criminals and crime (pp. 267-286). Roxbury Publishing Company.
5- Sutherland, E. H. (1945). Is "white collar crime" crime?. American Sociological Review, 10(2), 132-139.
Comments