When Companies Victimize the Public

In this chapter, we explore the way that companies victimize the public, through our analysis of environmental crime prosecutions within the United States. From 2,828 total prosecutions, we find 36 prosecutions where a company victimized the public either in the form of causing an evacuation, injury, death, or a combination of these actions. In the first section of the chapter, we mirror the flow from the previous chapter, where we explore patterns in prosecutions over time that involve companies victimizing the public. We organize prosecutions across broader themes in the second section and illustrate a number of case examples for each theme we find in the data. The last section describes trends in sentencing and punishment over time.