Individual Breaches of Environmental Laws in Cases from Public Administration Files

The characteristics of environmental transgressions and transgressors involved in 1,505 files handled by 4 public administrations were assessed. These administrations were in charge of environmental law enforcement in a highly protected setting, across federal, state, island, and municipality jurisdictions. Special attention was given to the transgressors' written responses to administrative sanctions included in the files. These were analyzed integrating the approaches of neutralization techniques and of accounts as strategies of conflict management. Results suggest that most environmental transgressions under study were carried out by private individuals in the personal domain of everyday life, and that transgressors' accounts of environmental transgressions were short, straightforward, and questioned the legitimacy of the environmental law being broken.