Oil and natural gas activity has grown dramatically over the last decade around the United States because, in part, of increased use of unconventional technologies like hydraulic fracturing. Social scientists have examined the broad array of impacts of this growth to communities disproportionately impacted by activity. This paper contributes to that work by using survey and qualitative interviews to examine the experiences of Coloradans with harm created by oil and gas activity when they live adjacent to production or extraction sites. Using a green criminological and critical criminological framing, our findings illuminate that Coloradans in these samples experienced persistent and patterned harm from oil and gas activity to which they lived proximate. Additionally—paralleling criminological literature on street crime—our findings indicate that official state records on harm prevalence is likely inaccurate and that, instead, a “dark figure” of harm exists. This results because of underreporting of harm by those who experience it which occurs in part, at least for those in our sample, because of a lack of trust or sense of fairness in the regulatory process.
A growing body of scholarship highlights the merits of fusing green criminology and environmental justice frameworks to better understand intersections among carceral systems, race‐ and class‐based stratification, and environmental harm. This paper explores how correctional institutions (CIs) with known histories of federal environmental law violations compare against other previously established environmentally harmful facilities and land uses. In this article, we ask: are prisons and other CIs that have violated federal environmental laws located proximate to areas where there is evidence of existing high‐pollution facilities? Relatedly, are CIs that have established noncompliant histories with federal environmental laws located in similarly marginalized and disadvantaged communities compared to other traditionally defined sites of environmental injustice and harm? To answer these questions, we utilize data from the EPA's Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) database. Our findings provide evidence that, within our sample of facilities that have recorded noncompliance with federal environmental laws, CIs are significantly more likely to be located proximate to Superfund sites than most of the other facility types/land uses and more likely to be located in communities with racially minoritized populations. Our findings have important implications for further research on carceral systems and environmental justice.
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