Environmental crime in The Netherlands: the offenders and the prosecutors

• In Event: EUROC PANEL 6: Life-course criminology and white-collar crime

Abstract

In the Netherlands and worldwide, there is increasing social, political and scientific attention on environmental crime. In science and policy, however, attention has mainly been focused on the criminogenic circumstances in which the crime takes place and less on the individual offenders who commit the crimes. Virtually nothing is known about individuals prosecuted for crimes such as manure fraud, importing of illegal pesticides or herbicides, or illegal waste trading, still less about any effect of criminal convictions on reoffending rates. We take a life course perspective, theorizing and empirically examining stability and change in the criminal careers of environmental crime offenders. While we focus on individual offenders, we consider the context in which offending takes places, drawing on theories of organized and organizational crime.

This study outlines the background profiles for environmental offenders, uses group-based trajectory models to analyze longitudinal patterns in criminal offences and other rule-breaking, such as traffic violations, and examines recidivism up to six years after settlement of the original environmental crime case. The sample consists of a cohort of prosecuted environmental criminals (natural persons) in extensive and serious environmental cases (so-called tailor-made cases) between 2012-2020.

Alongside the quantitative data we have carried out in-depth interviews with public prosecutors. One goal of this data is to determine whether we see an overlap in the offender groups we find in our trajectory models and the offender groups that public prosecutors see in their work. Another goal is to understand the decisions that prosecutors make when prosecuting environmental crime offenders and the perceived effectivity of the choices available to them when they do so. The results will be presented during the conference under-embargo.

Authors

• Jessica Hill, VU University

• Victor van der Geest, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

• Joost van Onna, Openbaar Ministerie, The Netherlands