PULLMAN, Wash. – When the federal government brings its toughest environmental enforcement actions against polluters, they tend to be in communities of greater wealth, not the most polluted places.
That's the takeaway from a new paper co-authored by a Washington State University researcher that examined criminal prosecutions by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from 2011 to 2020 in every U.S. county. The findings were published in the journal Nature Sustainability .
"You might reasonably expect the government to use its most consequential enforcement mechanism in the counties that are the most polluted," said Erik Johnson, a professor in WSU's Department of Sociology and a co-author of the new paper. "But it turns out they use it in the wealthier counties more. The more educated and wealthy the county is, the more likely the government is to enforce environmental regulations."
Criminal prosecutions, which can result in jail time, substantial fines and tax penalties, are the most serious enforcement actions taken by the EPA for violations of laws such as the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act. They are much rarer than civil cases, where the EPA may seek monetary fines.
Drawing on a dataset of 732 criminal prosecutions brought in 432 of the 3,143 U.S. counties, the team mapped where enforcement actions occurred and analyzed correlations among a range of socioeconomic and environmental factors. Past research has established that low-income people and people of color face disproportionate environmental harm, and federal regulators have at times adjusted their priorities to bring more attention to these disparities.
But in the recent analysis, the strongest correlation was found between enforcement actions and higher socioeconomic status. According to the findings, a county ranked in the 84th percentile of socioeconomic measures would have 24% more enforcement actions than a county at the median of socioeconomic measures, on average. This trend held true in both the Obama and first Trump administrations.
Researchers found no correlation between enforcement and measures of water and air quality, as tracked in the EPA's Environmental Quality Index. Counties with better land quality were actually more likely to see increased enforcement actions.
The researchers said the study does not make any claims about the overall prevalence of environmental crimes, given that environmental violations are underreported and rarely rise to the level of federal prosecution. Among the possible reasons for the enforcement pattern is a growing focus by regulators on individuals and smaller companies, as large industrial polluters – which are responsible for the most pollution – are often able to settle cases or avoid prosecution based on their legal resources.
There also may be institutional dynamics related to resource constraints, legal barriers, agency leadership and other organizational factors.
"These geographic patterns in EPA criminal prosecutions aren't necessarily a result of an intentional or overt process," said Pierce Greenberg, an assistant professor of sociology at Clemson University and lead author of the paper. "We're trying to identify the geographic patterning, and offer some explanations for why that might be. For example, counties that are farther away from a criminal enforcement office have fewer criminal prosecutions. So these organizational and institutional factors may be driving some of these trends."
Greenberg earned his PhD at WSU in 2018, then worked at Creighton University before moving to Clemson. The other co-authors were Jennifer Schwartz, James F. Short Distinguished Professor in the Department of Sociology at WSU, and Rylie Wartinger, a graduate student at Clemson.
Johnson said the disparities in enforcement – which fit into the larger context of how widening income inequality plays out in people's lives — raise questions about how well enforcement actions align with the purpose of environmental laws.
"What's the enforcement doing?" he said. "Is it responding to pollution in a pretty objective way? Or is it responding to community pressure where the community has enough economic status to press the issue?"
