Environmental and Green Crime

Abstract

This chapter presents an overview of the criminology/criminal justice literature on environmental crime, alternatively referred to as crimes against the environment or “green” criminology. Generally acknowledged to date back to the early 1990s, the literature on environmental and green criminology topics continues to garner attention from scholars around the world on an accelerating basis. In fact, despite some key limitations, this body of scholarship has contributed many interesting perspectives on theory, empirical patterns, and implications for policy involving legal interpretations, crime correlates, and justice system response. What the environmental/green criminology movement has not done, broadly speaking, is to enter the criminology/criminal justice mainstream to become a subject of common study for the discipline. This chapter identifies the philosophical and theoretical genesis of the green criminology movement (contextualizing its critical underpinnings) and noting some counter-perspectives on its evolution, before reviewing the literature concerning the correlates and consequences of environmental crime. Additional discussion is devoted to the conceptualization of environmental crime as a sub-form of corporate/white collar crime, and to the various legal and procedural elements commonly studied by social scientists. The chapter concludes with observations and recommendations for the future of criminology/criminal justice study of environmental crime.