Introduction

While there is a small, but growing literature that tries to tackle the thorny question of whether criminal enforcement tools for the environment are effective in the United States, few look at the role of environmental crime victims within the enforcement process. For political science and public policy researchers that care about the consequences of enforcement to criminologists that want to develop empirical and theoretical understandings of victimization, to the general public and policymakers concerned with how the administrative state protects the public from environmental harm, such an investigation is warranted. While earlier works addressed a number of issues about these questions, they have yet to fully explore the role environmental crime victims play in criminal investigations and prosecutions, the punishments meted out to offenders that harmed them, and to fully define and typologize the universe of these victims in the United States.