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Counterterrorism and Radical Eco-Groups: A Context for Exploring the Series Hazard Model

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Abstract

Objective

This study examines whether radical eco-groups have been deterred by legal sanctions. From a rational choice framework, I argue that members of these groups weigh costs and benefits. I measure an increase in costs, or an objective deterrence effect, through four federal sentencing acts targeted at reducing the criminal behavior of these groups [the tree-spiking clause of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act (ADA), the Animal Enterprise Protection Act (AEPA), the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), and the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA)] and hypothesize that this legislation decreased the hazard of subsequent attacks.

Methods

This research is a quasi-experimental design utilizing the 1,068 illegal incidents perpetrated in the name of the environment, animal, or both as extracted from the Eco-Incidents Database. Using series hazard modeling, I examine the time until the next incident, serious incident, and ideologically specific incident in relation to dummy variables operationalizing the enactment dates of the above legislation.

Results

All in all, the results are somewhat consistent with a rational choice framework and my hypotheses. The ADA decreased the hazard of another attack (11 %) and environment-only attack (15 %), while at the same time increasing the hazard of a terrorist, damage, and animal-related attack. AETA decreased the hazard of all (47 %), damage (42 %), and the behavior it was aimed at, that of animal-only incidents (52 %). However, neither the AEPA, nor AEDPA had a significant effect on any of the outcomes.

Conclusions

Overall, radical eco-groups were deterred by legal sanctions, but these findings are legislation and outcome specific in addition to including displacement effects.

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Notes

  1. Members of the Family, prosecuted for 17 attacks including multimillion-dollar arson of a Vail ski resort, were sentenced in 2007 and are serving between 37-188 months. Notable as the first case charged under AEPA and the reason for the disbandment of the group, members of SHAC were sentenced to 3-6 years each and ordered to pay a million dollars in restitution for their involvement in a website that posted home addresses of HLS employees. However, these laws have infrequently been utilized in federal prosecutions.

  2. As one reviewer noted, operationalizing serious incidents through those involving damage may very well encompass the occasional spray-painting event. However, most events do not take this form, but rather have enough damage associated with them to come to the attention of a media source.

  3. Due to the small number of tree-spiking attacks in the EID, I cannot analyze this as an outcome in the analyses. However, of the 31 tree-spiking attacks, 28 occurred after the implementation of the law suggesting it was ineffective.

  4. The four categories are animal motivated, environment motivated, multiple ideologies, and unknown.

  5. The sources of these additional chronologies include the National Alliance for Animals, the Fur Commission, the Department of Homeland Security, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Anti-Defamation League, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture. Most of these chronologies took the form of a narrative description of the incident listed by date, which was then coded for a sample of the variables included in the GTD. In addition, a number of academic sources were utilized. After these data were collected, a vetting process using secondary sources was conducted. The majority of cases were re-verified through a secondary source.

  6. The mean here refers to the percentage of incidents that occur during the time period.

  7. The 18-month sensitivity test was not possible for AETA given the series ended 13 months after its enactment.

  8. All interventions are placed in the same model. Thus, examining for short-term effects avoids any overlap between interventions.

  9. As with Dugan et al. (2005), I will also measure success density at 3 incidents as to keep the largest amount of observations and because it makes the most theoretical sense that recent success would be the most influential on the hazard of future incidents.

  10. As one reviewer noted, this variable only controls for a linear trend when it could be, in fact, quadratic in nature. However, a variable measuring this type of trend did not yield significance in any of the models.

  11. Terrorist incidents could involve property damage if the damage was considered irreplaceable or dangerous to persons (e.g. arson). Thus, terrorist and damage attacks are not subsets that add up to the total, but rather two different ways to examine the incidents.

  12. The remaining 28 incidents were consider an overlap of both ideologies and thus, were omitted from this particular analysis.

  13. As one reviewer noted, this does not hold for all sub-categories, especially those with a right-wing ideology.

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  1. Department of Criminal Justice, University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg, MO, 64093, USA

    Jennifer Varriale Carson

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Correspondence to Jennifer Varriale Carson.

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Carson, J.V. Counterterrorism and Radical Eco-Groups: A Context for Exploring the Series Hazard Model. J Quant Criminol 30, 485–504 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-013-9211-4

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