10 - Environmental Crime

Summary

The arguments presented in Chapter 9 continue to hold for this chapter on environmental criminal law. But we also join the models from Law and Economics on criminal law, as we noted with Becker’s and Stigler’s analysis. Fundamentally, the key issues here are the ability to deal in non-monetary sanctions, the need to improve the reliability of the environmental criminal law system to actually result in full adjudication from discovery of the crime to sentencing and punishment, as well as the effective determination of the sanction given the known rate of prosecution likelihood. The ability to address environmental aggressors with something beyond financial punishment is a strong tool offered by environmental criminal law. As there is always extra gravitas in the loss of freedom; thus, the potential risk of incarceration provides a strong incentive when the financial tools fail. While environmental law has made great progress in the last fifty years, environmental criminal law remains less often implemented around the globe. It is clear from the Law and Economics literature that sound theoretical models support the use of environmental criminal law alongside other public law efforts.