Do you worry about going to jail when you get rid of the pesticides from your garden? Probably not. Neither do many large corporations that are polluting on a much larger scale.

Actions committed by individuals or corporations that reduce ecosystem quality can be prosecuted as crimes if they violate federal environmental law and regulation.  It falls under the jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to investigate environmental crimes, which are then referred to the Department of Justice (DOJ) for prosecution. New research by Michael Lynch, Paul Stretesky, and Michael Long focuses on how situational crime prevention can be used to increase compliance with environmental regulations.

What exactly is situational crime prevention? In the larger field of criminology, situational crime prevention (SCP) theory looks at the potential for non-criminal-justice policies to control crime. Proponents of SCP look at the entire social picture to determine what caused a person to commit a crime. SCP theorists believe in looking at this larger picture of criminality because prosecution and punishment of crimes can have negative effects on perpetrators, causing them to become repeat offenders rather than helping them reenter society.

“Conservation criminology” focuses more narrowly on the effectiveness of environmental regulations and the factors that lead to environmental crimes. Environmental crimes have been seen as “nontraditional” crimes that are normally ignored by criminologists in their research on SCP. The authors of this research found that situational factors matter in identifying the causes of environmental harms or crimes. There cannot be a one-size-fits all SCP intervention that works for every environmental crime. Instead, the policies must be flexible enough to be used in a variety of situations. Governments at the local level are closest to the behaviors that cause environmental damage. They are in the best position to adapt an SCP policy to best fit the needs of their community.

Studies have found that the enforcement of environmental laws rarely leads to a significant decrease in violations. Green criminologists suggest that environmental laws can improve compliance in individual cases, however, they don’t have much effect on overall levels of ecological damage. Enforcement does not significantly enhance compliance with environmental laws. A recent study revealed that less than 1% of environmental cases from 1983 to 2013 resulted in criminal conviction- across all laws enforced by the EPA.

SCP policies can also look at the bigger picture of systematic causes of environmental crimes. One of these system-level factors is the constant expansion of capitalism. This requires using up more and more natural resources, causing extreme environmental harms. There could be a need for SCP economic policies that constrain the ever-continuing expansion of production. One big-picture suggestion from the research is a global conversion to steady-state economic policies. Steady-state economics is based around ideas that economic production is not limitless. It has physical limits that are imposed by the quantity of ecosystem resources. SCP policies can promote steady-state economics on a local level and can be built upon from there.

Let’s look at a specific example of an SCP policy related to environmentalism. In this case, the policy is payments for environmental services. These policies are a market-based way to promote land conservation. Land holders are paid when they preserve land that is ecologically sensitive. This sounds like a good idea in theory, but when a specific case in Costa Rica was studied, these policies did not actually prevent deforestation. This could be because land holders were still given more money to cut down the trees than they were to preserve them. Payments like this also require a large investment to get started, which can make them less appealing to governments.

A different case study shows another approach to an SCP intervention. In this case, rhino poaching is the environmental crime being focused on. Rhino species are critically endangered worldwide because there is a strong market for their horns. A creative SCP solution to the problem is dyeing rhino horns with a bright pink solution that is dangerous to humans but not to the rhinos. This is a specific example of an SCP intervention because it is a nontraditional way of combatting crime. Law enforcement officials targeting the poachers has not slowed down the rates of rhino death. This technique lowers the value of the horns on the market, which makes the rhinos less likely to be poached. Unfortunately, this treatment requires all rhino horns to be dyed, which can be difficult to manage in the wild.

There have not been many studies on the effectiveness of SCP policies for preventing environmental crimes. The lack of success with traditional enforcement and punishment policies shows that a better model is needed to reduce environmental crime. This research suggests that situational crime prevention shows promise for slowing the rates of environmental crime by focusing on local intervention and solutions, while a new economic model is worked toward on a more global scale.