Poster #44 - Corporate Criminal Persisters: Environmental Reoffending and Time to Failure - CANCELLED

• In Event: ASC Poster Session II

Abstract

Life course criminology has long been concerned with patterns of offending amongst individuals. Attempts to explore what such concepts can add to our understanding of corporate offending are still in their infancy, however. This poster focuses on one aspect of the criminal career, persistence, identified as the continuation of offending. It uses a sample of 147 companies sanctioned by the Environment Agency for England and Wales between 2010 and 2022. Following similar approaches with individual offenders, the analysis applies a Cox proportional- hazards regression to consider the impact of a variety of financial and structural variables on the time-to-event, in this case a second environmental offence. The initial results suggest that the industry the company operated within was significantly associated with a reduced time to a second offence, as was being in financial difficulty. These findings have implications for how regulators approach the scrutiny of companies, particularly when it comes to environmental harm, providing suggestions for where they might direct their efforts. More generally, this poster demonstrates one way in which criminal career concepts can be applied to the study of corporations, suggesting directions for future study.

Author

• Ben Hunter, University of Greenwich