Court Sentencing Patterns for Environmental Crimes: Is There a “Green” Gap in Punishment?

Objectives

This study examines sentencing patterns for environmental crimes and tests the assumption that “green” offenders receive more lenient treatment from criminal courts than non-environmental offenders.

Methods

We present two sets of analyses. First, we present an empirical portrait of environmental felony offenses convicted in a single state (Florida) over a fifteen-year period and the resulting criminal sanctions. Second, we use a precision matching analysis to assess whether environmental offenders receive more lenient treatment when compared to non-environmental offenders with the same characteristics and offense severity scores.

Results

Findings indicate that an overall small percentage of felony convictions in state courts stem from environmental crimes. We also find that punishments for environmental crimes are more lenient than sanctions assigned to comparable non-environmental offenses when the environmental crime is ecological, but that punishments are sometimes harsher when the environmental crime involves animals.

Conclusions

The findings provide general support for the argument that courts and other formal institutions of social control treat environmental crimes more leniently than non-environmental crimes. This paper also raises important questions about citizen and state actors’ perceptions of crimes against the environment and, more generally, about the ways in which theories of court sentencing behaviors apply to environmental crime sanctioning decisions.

     

Death Qualification in Black and White: Racialized Decision Making and Death‐Qualified Juries

Death qualification has been shown to have a number of biasing effects that appear to undermine a capital defendant's Sixth Amendment right to a fair jury. Attitudes toward the death penalty have shifted modestly but consistently over the last several decades in ways that may have changed the overall impact of death qualification. Specifically, the very large gap between black and white Americans' current support for capital punishment raises the question of whether death qualification procedures disproportionately exclude African Americans from capital jury participation. In order to examine this possibility, we conducted two countywide death penalty attitude surveys in the California county that has the highest percentage of African American residents in the state. Results show that death qualification continues to have a number of serious biasing effects—including disproportionately excluding death penalty opponents—which result in the significant underrepresentation of African Americans. This creates a death‐qualified jury pool with the potential to be significantly more likely to ignore and even misuse mitigating factors and to rely more heavily on aggravating factors in their death penalty decision making. The implications of these findings for the fair administration of capital punishment are discussed.     

Monetary Penalties and Noncompliance with Environmental Laws: a Mediation Analysis

Studies that assess the impact of monetary penalties on environmental compliance have yielded mixed results. While some studies suggest fines deter future violations other studies find that fines do little to encourage compliance. This longitudinal study examines the impact of the dollar amount of fines on compliance with environmental laws among major facilities in the state of Michigan (n?=?37). Results from a mediation analysis suggest that while noncompliance may slightly decrease immediately following a fine there are few changes to a firm’s long term compliance behavior. Furthermore, analyses of these data suggest that total fines levied prior to the most recent fine actually have a positive relationship with noncompliance. We suggest these results imply a decaying effect of deterrence that is perhaps connected to the organizational structure of the treadmill of production.     

Fire over water: China's strategic engagement of Somalia and the Gulf of Aden crisis

Abstract

Since China agreed to join the international counter-piracy coalition in late 2008, a watershed development in Chinese strategic policy, Beijing's engagement in Somalia is now following two separate streams. First, China is seeking to engage Somalia as part of its expanding number of African diplomatic partners via its participation in the coalition. Second, China is attempting to demonstrate, on the international level, its growing commitment to developing its naval capabilities, and protecting its maritime trade interests, by engaging in multilateral and coalition-based operations, namely to combat piracy off the Somali coast, in order to deflect criticism from the United States and its allies of China's overall military expansion and modernization.     

Management Roles in Political and Senior Civil Servant Positions: A Multiple-Study Approach

ABSTRACT

A recent trend in public administration studies has been to assess how public management is performed by politicians and top civil servants. Surprisingly, little is known about how these different posts develop their management roles. Following seminal management studies, we focus on core management roles to compare the ways in which politicians and top civil servants develop their management responsibilities within public organizations. Empirical evidence is provided by triangulating three separate studies developed in Spain. Results from the triangulation show that there is unmistakable evidence of differentiations between politicians and top civil servants when performing their managerial roles.     

Look Who's Talking: The Impacts of the Intrahousehold Allocation of Mobile Phones on Agricultural Prices

Using data from the Philippines, we study the impact of mobile phones on the prices agricultural producers receive for their cash crop. We first look at the impact on price of mobile phone ownership at the household level. Because this masks a considerable amount of heterogeneity, we then look at the impact on price of the intrahousehold allocation of mobile phones. We find that whether the household owns a mobile phone has no impact on price, but whether a farmer or spouse owns a mobile phone is associated with a 5- to 8-per cent increase in price.     

WHEN WAL-MART WIMPED OUT

Abstract

This article offers one China analyst's perspective on a variety of questions related to the unionization of all sixty-six Wal-Mart outlets in China. Why did China force Wal-Mart to unionize? If, as Marx, paraphrasing Hegel, wrote, “all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice,” is Mao making his comeback? Or if, as Marx immediately continued in his own right, “He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce,” is Hu Jintao playing Louis Bonaparte to Mao's Napoleon? Is the Chinese state acting out of a new level of confidence that it can now challenge the world's most prepossessing corporate giants in order to make good on its communist commitments? Is it running scared in the face of a working class that has at last managed to score a victory? Or is it actually strengthening its power through time-honored tactics of mass organizational control that have not really changed despite the new market context? Are China's workers being protected, empowered, or co-opted and subjected to new forms of state control? And why did one of the world's most militantly antiunion corporations go along? Did they have a choice? Did they fear China's state-run union federation? And finally, what does all this portend for the future of labor relations in China?     

A Review of Alcohol‐Impaired Driving: The Role of Blood Alcohol Concentration and Complexity of the Driving Task

The operation of a motor vehicle requires the integrity of sensory, motor, and intellectual faculties. Impairment of these faculties following the consumption of alcohol has been studied extensively through laboratory, closed‐course and on‐road driving, and epidemiological studies. The scientific literature was reviewed critically, with a focus on low‐to‐moderate blood alcohol concentrations (BAC ≤ 0.100%), to identify the most reliable determinants of alcohol‐impaired driving. Variables such as age, gender, driving skill, and tolerance were shown to have limited impact on impairment. It was concluded the most relevant variables are BAC and complexity of the driving task. The scientific literature provides a high degree of confidence to support the conclusion that a BAC of 0.050% impairs faculties required in the operation of a motor vehicle. Whether impairment is apparent depends upon the complexity of the driving task, which applies to both study design and actual driving.     

Environmental crime prosecutions in Ireland, 2004–2014

Despite increased interest in environmental crime and green criminology, few studies address the use of criminal penalties in response to environmental crimes. A handful of published examples employ data from the United States or the Flanders court system, and little is known about how other nations punish environmental violations. Addressing this issue, the current study examined the use of criminal environmental penalties in Ireland from 2004 to 2014. Few criminal environmental cases (N = 147) and few environmental offenders (N = 154) were represented in these data over time. Consistent with the expectations of green/environmental crime researchers, mean penalties for environmental violations, which in Ireland only include fines and investigative cost recovery penalties, were rather small. Unlike in the US or Flanders, the majority of offenders were corporate offenders as opposed to individuals. Contextual factors related to Ireland’s economy, history and use of criminal sanctions should be used to interpret these factors, and prevent generalising from these data.