While the previous two chapters focused on antisocial behavior, disor-der, and crime (“street crimes”), there has been very little description of crimes of the powerful, such as frauds, hustles, and scams, or what criminologists call “crimes in the suites,” white-collar crimes, or corpo-rate crimes. Although street crimes capture the public’s attention, we do not spend much time thinking about corporate crimes occurring in the oil and gas or mining industries. As these crimes are out of sight, they are also out of mind. There are three main types of white-collar offenses associated with these corporations: (a) financial crimes such as fraud and embezzlement, (b) violations of laws and regulations intended to ensure worker safety, and (c) environmental crimes, such as illegal dumping of toxic waste.
Critical criminologists such as Reiman and Leighton (2017) argue that crimes are defined by the rich and powerful, and the justice system is used to control the poor and maintain social relationships based on economic and political inequality. They contend that little attention is placed on the crimes of the powerful and that their offenses are not taken very seriously by policymakers. Do Reiman and Leighton have a valid point? A review of the dozens of boom–crime studies described in Chapter 3 reveals that none of them examined corporate crimes or acts carried out
by white-collar criminals. There is very little current scholarship about the thefts carried out by corporate offenders in the oil patch or in mining operations, and how that corruption leads to other crimes. In fact, the media have done a much better job of reporting these issues than social scientists.
For the most part, the public does not seem very interested in corporate crimes unless they are directly affected by them. But, we often experience the criminal actions of corporations or white-collar offenders indirectly. For example, everybody pays higher taxes when the environment has to be reclaimed after toxic chemicals are illegally dumped in a river. Our ability to enjoy the wilderness is also reduced when environmental crimes occur. Although city residents might not fully appreciate the seriousness of these offenses, these acts reduce the quality of our drinking water and food, and reduce our access to outdoor recreation. Moreover, workers injured on the job often require expensive care, and these costs are borne by taxpayers or customers in the form of higher costs. Last, frauds, hus-tles, and scams can lead to corruption and increased crime and violence, which have direct and indirect costs to society.
Sometimes, the impacts of the crimes of the powerful have a signifi-cant direct effect on us. Employees of firms that don’t comply with safety regulations or laws are at the greatest risk of being harmed because their employers took shortcuts, but the public is also placed at higher risk of harm. A tire that flies off a semi-trailer on the highway and strikes a pass-ing vehicle, for example, can be the result of shoddy maintenance or vio-lating safety regulations. The sleepy driver of a company truck pressured into working overtime also poses a risk to other vehicles. In either case, employers are accountable, but rarely are they held criminally responsible.
Few white-collar or environmental criminals are ever prosecuted or appear in state courts (Montana Board of Crime Control, 2014; North Dakota Attorney General, 2015; Wyoming Criminal Justice Information Systems, 2015). A logical question that comes from that observation is: why aren’t these offenders prosecuted? In some respects, the justice sys-tem has ignored the crimes of the powerful, although one can hardly be critical of the police, who are stretched thin responding to calls for service on the streets. Instead, investigating financial crimes often requires spe-cialized training that is beyond the skill level of police officers working
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in municipal departments or sheriff’s offices. In addition, many of these corporate and white-collar crimes are state and federal offenses, so they are prosecuted by law enforcement officials who are headquartered in cit-ies far from the boomtown. Last, most worker safety and environmental regulations are the responsibility of state and federal regulatory agencies.
While it is in the public’s interest to prosecute corporate crimes, there can be public or political resistance to fully enforcing the law. Most booms take place in impoverished locations and there may be opposition to any government interference that hinders economic development. As a result, this may deter the vigorous enforcement of crimes committed by corporations. Like other issues addressed in this book, the challenges confronting boomtowns tend to be interrelated and are sometimes dif-ficult to separate. In the following section, working definitions for the crimes of the powerful are presented. That section, in turn, is followed by sections describing the prevalence and special challenges in responding to financial crimes, workplace safety, and environmental crimes.
Crimes of the Powerful
Almost all media accounts of crime in the oil patch or mining boomtowns focus on street crime, although the review of crime statistics in Chaps. 3 and 4 shows that most of these acts tend to be minor offenses. These crimes have also captured the attention of researchers, and almost every study of the boom–crime relationship has focused on property, public order, and violent crimes. Absent from most discussions of boomtown crime are the offenses carried out by white-collar criminals and corpora-tions, what Kauzlarich and Rothe (2014) call “occupational and organi-zational crimes.” Occupational crimes are committed by individuals for their own benefit while at work. Some of these crimes are sophisticated, such as accountants skimming their employer’s funds. These offenses are called white-collar crimes because they are usually committed by well- educated and highly paid individuals holding positions of trust within the organization. Some occupational crimes involve less planning or skill, such as an oil-field employee who uses a company credit card to fuel up his or her personal vehicle.
The financial losses to organizations from crimes committed by their staff members and outsiders are high. A survey of US business leaders conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) (2016) found that 38% of corporations report losses, and some of the biggest losses are due to asset misappropria-tion. Nevertheless, internal fraud was seen as a less serious problem than crimes committed by offenders external to the business (PWC, 2016).
Corporate employees also engage in crimes to bolster the profits of their firms. Examples of organizational crimes include bribery, such as a company executive who pays government officials to receive preferen-tial treatment for his or her firm (e.g., authorizing drilling on public lands). A number of resource extraction firms also engage in tax evasion, fraud, and environmental crimes. Other companies disregard health and safety regulations intended to prevent employees from being injured or killed on the job. Some corporations also steal from their employees. The US Department of Labor has been investigating thousands of cases in the oil and gas industry where companies did not pay overtime or other benefits, and a number of class action lawsuits have been launched to recover these lost wages (Buhl, 2016). Some of these crimes involve large corporations. Boyce (2016) reports that Halliburton had shortchanged over 1000 employees and was required to pay them $18 million.
There is sometimes a question about whether acts related to the work-place, such as accidents in the oil patch or the release of toxic chemi-cals into the waterways, should be considered as crimes, and when these acts occur, who should be held accountable, and how severely should these individuals be punished. For example, if a worker is killed on the job because his or her employer failed to maintain equipment according to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards, should the employer be held accountable? Furthermore, how should the company be liable: is this a civil matter that can be resolved through a lawsuit, or was the failure to maintain equipment a criminal act, where company officials should be punished? These are difficult questions to answer, especially in tough economic times when governments want to encourage development and promote employment. Critical criminolo-gists argue, however, that some employers reward company officials who permit unsafe workplace practices and they seldom receive serious sanc-tions (see Gollan, 2015, for examples).
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Environmental crimes are acts that directly harm the environment. There has been increasing interest in green criminology, what South (2016, p. 11) calls a “term used to cover and capture the study of ecologi-cal or environmental crime or harm, and related matters of speciesism and environmental (in)justice.” Green criminologists focus on offenses related to resource extraction industries, including illegally dumping industrial waste; intentionally releasing toxic chemicals into the air, water, or ground; and failing to properly restore (reclaim) work sites after the extraction activities end. These scholars are also concerned about the impacts of those acts on humans, wildlife, and the environment. In the section that follows, the issues of financial crimes, worker safety, and environmental crimes are discussed.
Corruption and Financial Crimes
The billions of dollars of revenue generated from extracting natural resources can result in corruption, a broad term, defined as the abuse of power for private gain. EYGM (an Ernst & Young organization) created a handbook to help oil and gas industry stakeholders manage the problems of bribery and corruption (EYGM, 2014). The company contends that there are characteristics of this industry that make it more susceptible to bribery and corruption, including the formation of strong relationships between government officials and industry personnel. In addition, oil and gas operations tend to be spread around numerous rural and remote locations, where costs increase with delays or downtime. A reliance on developing local solutions to overcome these problems can also “create circumstances where there is a higher risk of fraud, bribery, corruption and other abuses” (EYGM, 2014, p. 7).
Wenar (2016) describes how oil and gas extraction has led to cor-ruption and violence throughout the world. Most of Wenar’s examples are related to poor nations with nationalized oil companies, and he contends that profits from those enterprises flow directly into nation-alized (state- owned) industries, which in turn are plundered by the ruling classes. But Wenar (2016) also notes that a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation found evidence of hundreds
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of American companies engaging in bribery, and he cites a US Senate investigation of corruption:
Payment of bribes to influence business decisions corrodes the free- enterprise system. Bribery short-circuits the marketplace. Where bribes are paid, business is directed not to the most efficient producer, but to the most corrupt. (p. 272)
North American companies, along with Australian and European firms, tend to have better anticorruption and corporate disclosure programs than the rest of the world (Transparency International, 2011). Bribes and corruption can be difficult to identify, and EYGM (2014) observes:
Bribes are not just payments to individuals or entities. Indirect bribery can include, for example, contributions to scholarship funds, charitable dona-tions, or payments to local development funds set up to provide govern-ment officials with a direct or indirect benefit. These may in themselves appear to be valid transactions, making it difficult for companies to detect improper payments. (p. 9)
So how widespread is bribery and corruption in the oil patch? Like other aspects of crime and justice in oil fields, we lack a full accounting of the prevalence of these crimes.
Few individuals are charged with bribery and corruption offenses. In North Dakota, for example, there were only two cases of bribery reported for 2014 and 2015 (North Dakota Attorney General, 2015), no cases were reported in Wyoming for 2015 (Wyoming Criminal Justice Information Systems, 2015), and in Montana, only three crimes related to bribery in official and political matters were reported for 2013 and 2014 (Montana Board of Crime Control, 2014). And since we lack specific information about any those cases, none could be directly associated with the oil and gas or mining industry.
The US government, through its Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), prosecutes companies engaged in bribery through the SEC and the Department of Justice. The FCPA is a civil and criminal statute, in which individuals found guilty can be imprisoned up to five years for par-ticipating in bribery and offenders are in jeopardy of 20-year sentences
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for violations of accounting laws. Although no corporate executives have actually been imprisoned for violating the FCPA, prosecutions have resulted in large fines imposed on corporations. Texas-based energy firms KBR and Halliburton bribed Nigerian officials between 1995 and 2004 in order to get preferential treatment in the construction of liquefied natural gas facilities and were resultantly fined $645 million. Although the federal government does not conduct many prosecutions, guilty par-ties can receive harsh penalties. In 2015 the US government received over $143 million in fines for 12 enforcement actions, which was down from almost $1.6 billion in fines imposed in 2014 (Shearman & Sterling LLC, 2016). Because individuals are rarely prosecuted and sentenced to jail or prison, these fines are often seen as a cost of doing business and, as a result, do little to deter future wrongdoing.
While reducing bribery and corruption is posited to increase industry efficiency, some believe that the FCPA puts American companies at a dis-advantage when competing with foreign firms—often based in China or Russia—which consider bribery as a normal business practice. As a result, White (2014) points out that American energy companies operating in other nations are only able to compete based on their technological exper-tise, equipment, and experiences in other nations. With respect to energy companies, bribery and corruption also result in political and social instabil-ity, hurts the public image of the participants, increases market inefficien-cies, and contributes to uncertainty and lawlessness (White, 2014, p. 210).
The Sherman Act of 1980 enables the prosecution of individuals and companies engaging in bid rigging, price-fixing, and fraud. A review of US federal antitrust prosecutions shows that being sentenced to jail or prison is a relatively rare occurrence. From 1990 to 2014, for exam-ple, 63 persons were sentenced to prison (less than three offenders per year), although average sentence lengths have been increasing: from 8 months between 1990 and 1999 to 25 months between 2010 and 2014 (US Department of Justice, 2015). During the years between 1990 and 2014 only seven firms engaged in the mining, quarrying, and oil and natural gas extraction sectors were prosecuted of the 375 cases examined by Levenstein, Marvao and Suslow (2015, p. 17).
The temptation to engage in illegal behavior increases along with the potential profits, and even people we consider rich can engage in white-collar crimes. Chesapeake Energy’s former Chief Operating Officer Aubrey
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McClendon was charged “with conspiring to rig bids for the purchase of oil and natural gases in northwestern Oklahoma” (US Department of Justice, 2016). According to the Department of Justice, McClendon was attempt-ing to suppress the amounts of leases paid to landowners and was part of a larger investigation into “price fixing, bid rigging and other anticompetitive conduct in the oil and natural gas industry.” McClendon died in a car crash after being indicted on the conspiracy charges (Pramuk, 2016).
Corruption and Legislators
Corruption thrives where the external oversight on government opera-tions is weak, such as in the case of small local or county governments and tribal governments. Although revenue from oil and gas leases and royalties has enriched some tribal residents, for example, others “may have been cheated out of hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties by a complex scheme” (Laduke, 2014). The Dentons law firm (2014) con-ducted an investigation of corruption on the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara (MHA) nation in North Dakota. Dentons reported that Tex “Red-Tipped Arrow” Hall, a tribal leader, demanded $1.25 million from an oil and gas company before he would approve their development plan. Dentons provided other examples of financial irregularities, and a tribal official claims that “the report contains evi-dence of at least nine potential federal crimes, including extortion and misuse of tribal funds” (Donovan, 2014a). Corruption can also be associ-ated with other crimes. Sontag and McDonald (2014) investigated how corruption in the MHA nation resulted in a murder in Washington State.
There is a long history of the exploitation of Native Americans who leased their tribal lands to drilling companies. Oil was found on lands belonging to the Osage Indians in Oklahoma in the late 1800s and mem-bers of this tribe became some of the richest Americans. These individu-als were preyed upon by corrupt officials and dozens of tribe members were murdered throughout the 1920s, and their lands often went to their guardians (who were prominent White community leaders). Grann (2017) describes how greed and injustice led to these crimes against this vulnerable population.
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Sontag (2014) observes that North Dakota legislators have been criti-cized as being too cozy with the oil and gas industry. The close relation-ships between industry executives and elected officials comes from the money that flows from oil and gas companies to politicians from all levels of government. These companies fund the election campaigns of politi-cians who support their interests and they expect favorable treatment once their candidates are elected. In 2015 the oil and gas industry spent almost $130 million lobbying federal legislators, and the mining and coal mining industries spent another $22 million and $8.4 million, respec-tively (Center for Responsive Politics, 2016). These close relationships resulted in legislative victories for the oil and gas industry, including the enactment of the 2005 Energy Policy Act, which provided tax incentives for the oil and gas industry and made it easier for firms in this sector to obtain loans.
State politicians also receive campaign funding. The Energy Transfers Partners’ political action committee, for example, spent over $869,000 supporting North Dakota state politicians in the 2014 and 2016 elec-tions, and O’Connell (2016) notes that “years of political graft” result in favorable treatment for projects and “ensure that these projects face few, if any, legislative hurdles to approval.” McBeath (2016, p. 215) observes that Republican Party candidates receive the most contributions from the oil and gas sector, and those funds are often channeled into state politi-cal races because “campaign dollars go farther and exert more influence at the state than the national level because the state level has less parti-san competition.” State legislators may be reluctant to cast votes against the industries funding their campaigns. In a New York Times investiga-tion, Sontag and Gebeloff (2014) describe how the North Dakota state government generally takes a collaborative rather than an enforcement approach to oil and gas companies violating environmental regulations. These reporters found that fines imposed on oil and gas companies for violations of state regulations are typically discounted 90%, and they describe how a company was fined $75,000 but was only required to pay $7500. These discounts might not deter the reckless conduct of these firms, and the amount of environmental damage happening in some places can be devastating. Sontag and Gebeloff (2014) report that “more than 18.4 million gallons of oils and chemicals spilled, leaked or misted
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into the air, soil and waters of North Dakota from 2006 through early October 2014” and oil companies “reported spilling 5.2 million gallons of nontoxic substances.”
There is growing concern about the proximity of drilling operations to residential areas, and several Colorado and Texas cities enacted laws ban-ning some extraction activities, such as fracking, within city boundaries. Colorado and Texas state legislators have, however, restricted the ability of local or county governments to regulate drilling, and the courts have sided with the legislatures. This has resulted in a growing number of wells being drilled in residential areas and close to schools and playgrounds (Willow, 2014). While these state rulings have supported fracking, they have also led to a growing grassroots movement opposing unconventional drilling, and advocacy groups have successfully enacted bans on fracking in New York and Maryland.
Altogether, there seems to be little public concern over the extent of white-collar crime in the oil patch, and as a result, a relatively small num-ber of people are arrested or prosecuted. Moreover, most sanctions for cor-porations guilty of engaging in white-collar offenses are fines rather than imprisonment of corporate leaders. The lack of arrests and convictions could mean one of two things. The first is that critical criminologists are correct and crimes of the powerful are overlooked because the policymak-ers influencing the enforcement actions of the justice system do not want these offenses investigated or prosecuted. The alternative explanation is that these acts of corruption, bribery, price-fixing, and other white-collar crimes in the oil patch occur at approximately the same rate as in other industries. We will not know the true extent of these crimes until research sheds light on the matter.
Worker Safety
There is a long history of wrongdoing in the oil and gas or mining sec-tors that have placed workers at risk of injury or death. Between 1900 and 1980 over 100,000 workers—about 1250 persons per year—died in US coal mines, although the number of fatalities has decreased in later years. From 2000 until 2014 there were another 446 deaths, or about
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30 workers a year (Gowrisankaran, He, Lutz, & Burgess, 2015, p. 2). Some of those deaths occurred because mining companies failed to com-ply with occupational health and safety regulations intended to protect workers from being harmed on the job. A central question of this chapter is whether failures to ensure safe working conditions placed those work-ers at risk and whether this is a crime or a civil matter.
Rarely do crimes resulting in worker injuries or deaths result in prison sentences for corporate executives, as fines are imposed for most violations of state or federal regulations. Even when convicted, some firms found guilty of violating health and safety regulations don’t pay their fines. A study by National Public Radio found that “2,700 mining company owners failed to pay nearly $70 million in delinquent penal-ties,” and that “mines that don’t pay their penalties are more danger-ous than mines that do, with injury rates 50 percent higher” (Berkes, Boiko-Weyrauch & Benincasa, 2014, paragraph 9). These observations raise the question of whether a lack of meaningful sanctions leads to unsafe practices.
Working in the oil and gas industry is one of the most dangerous jobs in America, and the growth in the number of rigs between 2007 and 2014 contributed to an increase in job-related fatalities. For 2014, the fatal injury rate for mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction was 9.8 for every 100,000 workers, which was almost three times the national rate (3.4 fatal injuries for every 100,000 workers) (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2016a). Workers employed in smaller firms might be at higher risk of work-related injuries, as larger companies are said to have stronger safety cultures. Bamberger and Oswald (2015, p. 587) asked an industry insider from the Marcellus Shale gas industry about safety practices and were told: “[T]here is a good probability that the smaller company can’t afford the equipment that the bigger company can. It is more about the equipment that they use and the shortcuts that they might take.” When asked about the safety culture, this respondent told the researchers that since all company workers received a safety bonus if nobody on the job site was injured, there were financial incen-tives for workers who didn’t report minor injuries. As a result, work-ers who brought up safety-related issues that reduced production or decreased worker incentives were subject to high levels of peer pressure.
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Bamberger and Oswald (2015) cite an example from an employee of Marcellus Shale:
A friend of ours, he was an older gentleman who thought he was having a heart attack. He was told, “suck it up, old man, we aren’t losing our bonus, let’s get this hole made.” I mean this guy is having chest pains and this kid looks at him and says “suck it up, old man.” No empathy, and that is a lot of the mentality out there. (p. 588)
A North Dakota attorney who represents injured oil and gas workers was interviewed by West and McDonnell (2012, paragraph 7) and he said: “There are ways of manipulating injury rates in a way that’s really disin-genuous.” Companies in some states, for example, can bypass a worker’s compensation claim if they continue to pay an employee who is recover-ing from a workplace injury. Smaller operators take this step to avoid records of worker injuries, as those records can make it difficult to secure contracts with bigger firms.
Employers also fire or blacklist employees they perceive as trouble- makers. When asked about sanctions employers imposed on workers who brought up safety concerns, the respondent in Bamberger and Oswald’s (2015) Pennsylvania study said:
Calling HR [Human Resources] or OSHA or even muttering those words, you’re going down the road. You might not go down that road that day, but they will find a reason that you will be going … I’ve heard threats of calling OSHA, but I never got to work with those guys no more. They were termi-nated. (p. 599)
Reporters studying the issue of safety in the North Dakota oil patch found that coworkers used peer pressure to discourage their colleagues from reporting minor injuries occurring on the job (West & McDonnell, 2012).
Examining workers’ compensation claim statistics for the oil and gas industry sheds some light on the issue of occupational injuries. Figure 5.1 shows that claims grew 304.9% between 2010 and 2015 for jobs in oil and gas development and drilling, oil-well servicing, and oil-well truck-ing in North Dakota. Some of that increase, however, is to be expected,
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given the larger number of workers in these industries. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (2014) reports that employment in the oil and gas indus-try increased by 354.3% between 2007 and 2012. Like other boomtown effects described throughout the book, once the population growth of oil and gas workers is considered, the magnitude of the boomtown effect sometimes deceases.
The North Dakota Workforce Safety & Insurance (2015, p. 41) annual report includes information about claims from workers from the energy sector. Of the 1542 claims filed by oil and gas industry workers between 2010 and 2014, slightly less than one-quarter (22.9%) were for strains, and that injury was followed by contusions (15.2%), lacerations (11.4%), sprains (11.1%), and fractures (9.8%). The most common events precipitating the injuries were strains caused by lifting (7.9%), which was followed by slipping or falling on ice or snow (6.7%) and being struck or injured by an object (6.5%) (North Dakota Workforce Safety & Insurance, 2015, p. 44). While some of these injuries appear to be fairly minor, such as strains and sprains, they can result in debilitating pain when one has a demanding physical job.
Oil-field workers are also exposed to toxic chemicals. Extraction of nat-ural gas exposes workers to hydrogen sulfide, which is a very poisonous,
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Fig. 5.1 Worker compensation claims, North Dakota: oil and gas industries, 2010–2015 (Source: North Dakota Workforce Safety & Insurance, 2015, 2017)
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corrosive, and flammable gas, and has killed many oil patch employees. Moreover, toxic chemicals, including benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene, and xylene, are used in fracking, and long-term exposure to these chemi-cals may pose a risk to humans (Adgate, Goldstein, & McKenzie, 2014). Some oil-field personnel are not fully aware of the risks posed by expo-sure to these chemicals, especially when working for smaller firms or in part-time positions, where they don’t receive formal safety training. Moreover, some workers are exposed to toxic chemicals but might not experience any symptoms until years after their exposure. Because frack-ing is a relatively new technology, there is very little information about the long-term health implications of ongoing exposure to these irritants, which is an important topic for future research.
Berzon (2015) observes that downturns in oil production and a desire to cut costs may lead to some companies hiring less experienced work-ers, who take shortcuts, which results in a greater number of workplace injuries. Even experienced workers might feel pressured to work harder in order to keep their jobs. There may be some merit in those perceptions, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2016b) reports that workers engaged in oil and gas extraction increased their productivity by 11.4% between 2014 and 2015 (worker output increased 7.4%, while hours worked decreased by 4.4%). Bittle (2016, p. 333) observes that workplace injuries and deaths resulting from unsafe working conditions have historically been considered “accidents,” but these acts should instead be considered “seri-ous matters deserving of criminal justice attention.”
The National Council for Occupational Safety (2015) reports that many workplace deaths are preventable if managers ensured that work-ers followed health and safety regulations. This organization reports that the median penalty after occupational health and safety fatality inspec-tions was $5600, and that there were only two criminal prosecutions of company executives in 2015 for acts resulting in workplace deaths (National Council for Occupational Safety, 2015, p. 12). One of those prosecutions resulted in Donald Blankenship being sentenced to serve one year in prison on charges that he conspired to violate federal mine safety standards after an explosion in 2010 killed 29 workers in a West Virginia mine (Blinder, 2016). Given these facts, we can question whether better enforcement, higher fines, a greater number of prosecutions, and harsher
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sentences would improve conditions for those working in resource extrac-tion industries.
The AFL-CIO (2017), a worker advocacy organization, reports the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) penalties for violations of workplace safety regulations in 2016:
• The average penalty for a serious violation was $2402 for federal OSHA.
• The average penalty for a serious violation was $1747 for OSHA state plans.
• The median penalty for killing a worker was $6500 for federal OSHA.• The median penalty for killing a worker was $2500 for OSHA state
plans.• Only 93 worker death cases have been criminally prosecuted under the
Occupational Safety and Health Act between 1970 and 2016. (p. 3)
Along with our changing ideas of accountability for wrongdoing, the sanctions for corporations and their owners and leaders have also increased. Of the prosecutions occurring between 1970 and 2015, all of the defendants found guilty of OSHA violations served a total of 110 months in jail. The AFL-CIO (2017, p. 25) reports that in 2016, there “were 170 criminal enforcement cases initiated under federal environ-mental laws and 184 defendants charged, resulting in 93 years of jail time and $207 million in fines and restitution.”
In terms of commercial vehicle safety, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (2016) reports that in 2015, of almost 3.4 million road-side inspections (by federal and state officials), serious violations that resulted in an out-of-service order were found for 4.9% of drivers, 20.3% of vehicles, and 3.9% of hazardous material transports. Although some of these violations are fairly minor—such as improper signage or missing paperwork—serious violations included transporting unsecured objects, mechanical problems such as faulty brakes, and operating vehicles with-out a commercial driver’s license. Those statistics show that about one in three commercial vehicles on the road is violating some safety regulation. Ultimately, the owners of those trucking companies are responsible for ensuring their vehicles and drivers are safe.
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In the previous section, we could find little evidence that corrup-tion and fraud were widespread in the oil and gas industry. When it comes to worker safety, by contrast, there is a long history of compa-nies involved in resource-based industries taking shortcuts and placing worker safety in jeopardy. When it comes to these issues, people are generally divided into two groups: those who believe that acts putting workers at risk should be prosecuted as crimes, and those who believe that unintentional injuries and deaths resulting from workplace inci-dents are civil matters. It is clear, however, that while fines are the pri-mary sanction imposed on individuals or corporations for violations of workplace safety regulations and laws, jail or prison sentences are rarely imposed.
Environmental Crimes
The topic of environmental crimes is much like the issue of worker safety described previously: some people believe that individuals or cor-porations responsible for the unintentional release of toxic materials into the environment should be harshly punished, while others contend that those acts are not always preventable and ought to be expected. Most members of the public, however, would likely agree that individu-als or firms illegally dumping the wastes produced by conventional or unconventional energy development should be punished. Like other issues in this book, the degree to which boomtown residents perceive environmental impacts as crimes seems to depend on whether they ben-efit economically from the boom and their proximity to the boom. The general public was largely unaware of fracking or its harmful environ-mental impacts until documentaries such as Gasland were released in 2010. Since that time, there has been growing grassroots opposition to fracking as well as to all forms of carbon-based energy use (Vasi, Walker, Johnson, & Fen Tan, 2015).
Environmental activists are concerned that some mining or energy extraction companies willfully disregard environmental legislation and their practices lead to serious environmental harms. As a result, they believe that the owners and managers of the firms responsible for these
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harms should be prosecuted. There is a range of adverse effects associated with conventional resource development (both oil and gas and mining) and include air, light, noise, and water pollution. Fracking also produces a similar set of environmental impacts and has also been associated with an increased number of earthquakes (Kuchment, 2016; Rice, 2017). Fracking may also produce more severe long-term environmental effects because of the need to dispose of the chemicals used in those processes.
Some scientists argue that there is a direct relationship between burn-ing excess natural gas at drilling sites and climate change. The US Energy Information Administration (2016) reports that in 2014, 36% of North Dakota’s gas production was either vented (when gas is released directly into the environment) or flared (burned), although the amount decreased to 10% of production by March 2016. Venting and flaring occur because producers were not able to construct pipelines fast enough to capture these gases. There had been so much flaring in North Dakota that the flames could be seen from space and their light was as intense as those pro-duced by all of the electric lights of Seattle or Denver (Infinia Technology Corporation, 2016).
One troubling by-product of fracking is that disposing wastewater into out-of-production oil and gas wells causes earthquakes. An article in the Scientific American notes that injecting these fluids deep into shale founda-tions “alter[s] stresses that hold geologic faults together, letting them slip, unleashing an earthquake” (Kuchment, 2016, paragraph 2). At first, the rela-tionship between fracking and earthquakes was anecdotal—residents living close to fracking operations told researchers about feeling the ground shake in regions with no prior history of earthquakes, such as Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Not only has the number of earthquakes increased, but their mag-nitude has also been growing (Boone & Robinson, 2015). These earthquakes have cracked the foundations of homes, and researchers found that fracking has reduced the value of residential real estate in Britain (Gibbons, Heblich, Lho, & Timmins, 2016) and the United States (Gopalakrishnan & Klaiber, 2013). Conca (2016) observes that the disposal of wastewater is the cause of these earthquakes, and not the fracking itself, and that these earthquakes don’t occur in all places where wastewater is disposed.
There are other adverse effects of oil and gas extraction. Duke University researchers found that about 3900 accidental spills of oil and
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gas wastewater occurred in North Dakota between 2007 and 2015, and this wastewater polluted waterways with toxic chemicals, which can have a long-term environmental impact (Lauer, Harkness, & Vengosh, 2016). In an interview about their research, Vengosh says: “Many smaller spills have occurred on tribal lands, and as far as we know, no one is monitor-ing them,” [and] “People who live on the reservations are being left to wonder how it might affect their land, water, health and way of life” (Lucas, 2016, paragraph 8).
Some toxic waste is illegally dumped by individuals who contracted with companies paying for a proper and legal disposal, while other firms intentionally illegally dump their waste. One example is the filters from fracking that hold radioactive materials called “frack socks,” or what Sontag (2014) calls the “used condoms of the oil industry.” Since these filters contain radioactive materials, they must be trucked out of North Dakota for disposal. Donovan (2014b), however, reports how several hundred of these filters were found in an abandoned gas station in a small North Dakota town. Because the town of 120 residents has no access to cleanup funds, the state’s Industrial Commission was asked to provide funds for their proper disposal (Donovan, 2014b).
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) investigates cases of environmental crimes, and in fiscal year 2016, fewer than 20 cases were prosecuted for violations of federal law related to the oil and gas and min-ing industries. Many of these prosecutions were related to violations of the Clean Water Act or Clean Air Act, although there were some fraud and conspiracy offenses, and while most of these cases resulted in fines, several offenders were sentenced to prison.
One controversial practice is using wastewater from drilling operations for crop irrigation. This practice became more widespread in California after a multiyear drought forced farmers and ranchers to look for sources of water (Nussbaum & Wethe, 2015). One hazard of using wastewater for irrigation is that we don’t know how many of the chemicals in these wastewaters end up in the fruits or vegetables that we eat, including foods labeled as organic. One environmental group claims that oil and gas wastewater has been used for irrigation since the 1980s (Monaco, 2016).
There are other adverse environmental impacts such as noise pollu-tion (from traffic and the sounds produced by extraction activities and
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diesel generators producing electricity for rural sites). Residents living near drilling operations report changes in the appearance, odor, and taste of their drinking water, and some complain about the bright night-time lights on the rigs (Perry, 2012). In the past, fewer people were exposed to these adverse environmental effects, as most drilling occurred in the countryside. As noted above, however, a growing number of extraction activities are taking place in residential neighborhoods. Because of the noise and the air or water pollution from these sites, homeowners may find it difficult to sell their houses. Researchers found that home values decrease in communities with shale gas development (Muehlenbachs, Spiller, & Timmins, 2015). Those findings are not surprising, as few of us would willingly want to live beside an oil or gas well, or tanks holding fuel or wastewater.
Oil and gas extraction activities can reduce our quality of life. Water, air, and noise pollution may also have an adverse impact on our health and well-being. The chemicals from the wastewater produced by fracking and conventional energy production might also end up in our food or drinking water. Furthermore, earthquakes produced by pumping waste-water into unused wells damages homes and their value decreases. Last, flaring natural gas might contribute to climate change and leads to light pollution. But does a reduction in the quality of our lives rise to the level of a crime? We have to question whether the justice system is the best way to respond to acts resulting in environmental harm.
Protests Against the Powerful
There has been an increasing amount of attention paid to the issue of environmental justice, which is defined by the EPA (2017, paragraph 1) as “fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the develop-ment, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regula-tions, and policies.” Two important principles of environmental justice are that no group or community should bear the full consequences of environmental impacts resulting from development, and that the public be involved in decisions affecting them. Many residents living close to oil
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and gas drilling sites feel powerless to limit that development: McKenzie, Allshouse, Burke, Blair, and Adgate (2016) report that over 378,000 Coloradans lived within a mile of an active oil and gas well.
The vast number of people affected by natural resource development and the awareness of environmental issues have led to an increasing num-ber of protests directed at the industries involved in energy extraction. The size of this movement has been growing, and its members appear to be tapping into a growing public awareness and concern over environ-mental issues. Gallup polls reveal that the opposition to fracking grew from 40% in 2014 to 51% in 2015 (Swift, 2016). There was a similar increase in the proportion of Americans who expressed a great deal of worry regarding the pollution of drinking water, rivers, lakes, and reser-voirs, and global warming (McCarthy, 2016).
The ground zero for environmental protests in 2016 was Morton County, North Dakota, where thousands of protestors temporarily halted the construction of the 1172-mile Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) that was being built to transport oil from the Bakken oil fields to Illinois. Brodwin (2016) describes that these protests included members of over 100 Native American tribes, who were concerned that the pipeline passed through a burial site and that spillages or leakages would contaminate drinking water. Public support for these protestors became more broadly based after a newscast went viral that depicted a security force work-ing for the pipeline company pepper-spraying and using guard dogs in a clash with protestors (Associated Press, 2016). After those clashes became violent, law enforcement officers and troops from the National Guard were brought in to manage the protests. Protests opposing the DAPL occurred throughout North America and drew a group of celebrities, war veterans, and Native Americans to protest in North Dakota.
While millions of Americans have protested environmental issues, a very small number of them engage in ecoterrorism, which are crimes undertaken in the name of the environment. US ecoterrorism attacks peaked between 2000 and 2002, with over 100 attacks per year and then decreased to about ten attacks a year after 2010 (Yang, Su, & Carson, 2014). Unlike other terrorist groups, which target people, eco-terrorist groups commit crimes that usually involve vandalism or arson and are directed at objects. Attacks on oil and gas pipelines or drilling
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and mine sites have occurred and ecoterrorist groups have taken credit for setting fire to sport utility vehicles at car dealerships, damaging industrial machinery, as well as setting fire to the homes of oil industry executives.
Summary
Most of the discussion about the boom–crime relationship by scholars or in the media focuses upon street crimes. While researching street crime is important to fully understand boomtown effects, criminologists have paid little attention to the crimes of the powerful and the impacts of these acts on the environment, the public, and workers. With respect to the impact on the environment, Lynch et al. (2015) observe:
Pollution is a serious behavior that involves emitting harmful substances into the environment. Criminology pays little attention to these serious harms. These behaviors of the powerful have serious consequences, and criminologists have done little to address policies for the control of envi-ronmental victimization from pollution. (p. 855)
One reason why we don’t fully investigate this issue can be traced to the public’s ambivalence about these acts and whether they are really crimes. Opsal and O’Connor Shelley (2014) note that some acts are not criminal in nature, but nonetheless harmful to the environment, and that the dis-tinction between harmful and criminal behavior can be blurry.
Dumping toxic wastes in waterways, violating occupational health and safety laws, and bribing government officials are clearly crimes, and nearly everybody would agree that these acts be prosecuted because they threaten the environment and public safety. Environmental offenses and injuries resulting from violations of workplace safety regulations can also be a burden on taxpayers. In addition to the economic costs, environ-mental crimes reduce the quality of boomtown life and pose some risks to the health of workers, the public, wildlife, farm animals, and pets.
Critical criminologists point out that the justice system does a poor job of punishing individuals or corporations who engage in practices
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leading to the injuries or deaths of their employees, the public, or their customers (Reiman & Leighton, 2017). The fact that hardly any corpo-rate executives are ever imprisoned because of their criminal behaviors suggests that their argument has some merit. One shortcoming in the boomtown research literature is a lack of information about the crimes of the powerful and whether our efforts to control them are successful. By ignoring these crimes, it is plausible that the populations negatively affected by these offenders will become cynical toward the justice system and less likely to obey the law (Tyler, 2006).
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