Environmental Crime

Modern society has been forever plagued by the problem of ensuring the proper disposal of refuse. Until recently, most people did not make a distinction between innocuous and dangerous wastes. Waste was considered by most people to be a common term describing all types of garbage. The ultimate destination of both innocuous and dangerous waste was the local landfill. Business firms dumping their wastes were considered to be nuisances, rather than criminals. The common images of the dumper and the criminal were worlds apart. In the 1970s, however, the growing threat to public health was underscored by an increasing number of high-profile acts of improper dumping of highly toxic wastes. This led to the enactment of the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 (RCRA), which made the indisciminate disposal of wastes that posed significant risks for human health and for the general environment a crime. Since the RCRA was enacted, every state has developed laws modeled after it establishing criminal penalties for environmental crimes.

Grassroots movements have helped elevate the issue of environmental protection to a serious matter of community safety that has increasingly been seen by local public officials as an important obligation. Community leaders and the public they represent have turned to their elected officials for the type of protection they have come to expect from them for more traditional crimes. After years of setbacks in their attempts to raise environmental violations to the level of criminal behavior, environmental crime control officials have witnessed a change in the winds of sentiment on this issue. For example, in a 1991 study conducted by Environmental Opinion Study Inc., U.S. citizens were found to overwhelmingly favor terms of incarceration for corporate or government officials convicted of deliberately violating pollution laws.

The criminalization of human behavior judged to be harmful to the public is typically a slow process in common-law jurisdictions. The momentum for criminalization, gained through problem identification and pressure exerted by special-interest groups, can easily span decades before legislatures classify undesirable actions as crimes. A rare exception to this problem has been the relatively speedy transformation of acts of pollution into official crimes against the environment. National media coverage of toxic tragedies like those occurring at Love Canal, New York, in the late 1970s, and at Times Beach, Missouri, in the early 1980s, altered forever the American public's perception of the dangers of the improper disposal of hazardous waste. These events also sparked the quick passage of criminal [Page 619]laws on both the federal and state levels prohibiting offenses against the environment.