This project explores lay victims’ conceptions of environmental crime and environmental injustice through in-depth interviews with a snowball sample of people affected by, and former employees of, the Chem-Dyne Superfund site in Hamilton, Ohio, USA. Qualitative content analysis revealed that participants used the following criteria to define both environmental crime and environmental injustice: illegality, intentionality, harm and safety, and unfairness. These findings have important implications for studies of environmental crime and environmental injustice: (1) Lay victims’ conceptions of environmental crime and environmental injustice are multidimensional concepts; (2) lay victims’ conceptions of environmental crime and environmental injustice are mostly anthropocentric; (3) there is significant conceptual overlap between environmental crime and environmental injustice in lay victim accounts; and (4) lay victims’ conceptions of environmental crime and environmental injustice are similar to, yet distinct from, formal and academic definitions.
Participants were asked if they identified as Appalachian because Hamilton was one of the major Midwestern urban destinations of Appalachian migrants, an often marginalized and exploited population, from the 1950s through the 1970s (McCoy & Brown, 1981).
Hamilton was 94.2 percent white in 1970 (Bureau of the Census, 1973) and 92.7 percent non-Hispanic white in 1980 (Bureau of the Census, 1983). Although most participants were white, note that two are Native American.