Motivations, opportunities, and controls of environmental crime: an empirical test of Kramer and Michalowski’s integrated theoretical model of state-corporate crime

Abstract

Environmental issues have increasingly been examined as criminal in recent decades. The current study builds on this criminological momentum by investigating water pollution using a state-corporate crime perspective. Although Kramer and Michalowski’s [1] integrated theoretical model of state-corporate crime has mostly been employed as a categorization tool, using a dataset measuring Environmental Protection Agency water violations in several industries (i.e., pulp mills, paper mills, petroleum refining, steel works, blast furnaces, and rolling), the current study offers a rare quantitative test of the logical propositions of Kramer and Michalowski’s model. Following this model, the impact of motivation for, opportunity for, and control of water violations were investigated using Poisson regression. Motivation was the only of these three factors to demonstrate a significant effect on water violations. Overall, it appears that the current study has provided support that motivation to commit crime may be more important than opportunities to commit crime or crime control. Due to the data’s age, the results of this study should be taken with reservations when informing potential policies to reduce environmental crime, specifically water pollution. Future research should continue to explore how motivation, opportunity, and control impact corporate/state crime in relation with one another using a multitude of methods.