ABSTRACT
Criminologists rarely examine the effects of state enforcement mechanisms on the overall trends in toxic releases. This is surprising because the overall goal of environmental regulation regimes should be to prevent or reduce environmental harm in general. This harm reduction might occur through a variety of mechanisms, including some form of specific or general deterrence where the punishment of environmental violators would help reduce toxic releases in general. Moreover, we would expect that if a regulatory regime were effective, there would be a negative correlation between large penalties and general toxic releases that would limit the global expansion of environmental damage.
