This book addresses the causes of rising crime rates resulting from the rapid population growth and industrialization associated with natural resource extraction in rural communities. Ruddell describes the social problems emerging in these boomtowns, including increases in antisocial behavior, as well as property-related and violent crime, industrial mishaps and traffic collisions. Many of the victims of these crimes are already members of vulnerable or marginalized groups, including rural women, Indigenous populations, and young people. The quality of life in boomtowns also decreases due to environmental impacts, including air, water and noise pollution. Law enforcement agencies, courts, and correction facilities in boomtowns are often overwhelmed by the growing demand as these places are seldom able to manage the population growth. The key questions addressed here are: who should pay the costs of managing these booms, and how can we prepare communities to mitigate the worst effects of this growth and development and, ultimately, increase the quality of life for boomtown residents. An in-depth and timely study, this original work will be of great interest to scholars of violent crime, criminal justice, and corporate harm.

This book addresses the causes of rising crime rates resulting from the rapid population growth and industrialization associated with natural resource extraction in rural communities. Ruddell describes the social problems emerging in these boomtowns, including increases in antisocial behavior, as well as property-related and violent crime, industrial mishaps and traffic collisions. Many of the victims of these crimes are already members of vulnerable or marginalized groups, including rural women, Indigenous populations, and young people. The quality of life in boomtowns also decreases due to environmental impacts, including air, water and noise pollution. Law enforcement agencies, courts, and correction facilities in boomtowns are often overwhelmed by the growing demand as these places are seldom able to manage the population growth. The key questions addressed here are: who should pay the costs of managing these booms, and how can we prepare communities to mitigate the worst effects of this growth and development and, ultimately, increase the quality of life for boomtown residents. An in-depth and timely study, this original work will be of great interest to scholars of violent crime, criminal justice, and corporate harm.

Texas accounts for 43% of the nation's crude oil production and 26% of its natural gas production (EIA, 2021). As a top-producing state, Texas has experienced stability in the oil and natural gas (ONG) industry since the turn of the 20th century. With ONG activity, however, comes social change, including a number of social ills, such as an increase in criminal offenses. Although previous research has assessed the effects of ONG production-related changes on the number of crimes through perception and economic studies, few have examined the relationship between ONG activity and crime patterns in Texas. Consequently, the focus of this dissertation is to determine the impact of changes in ONG production on changes in serious crime while considering indicators of sociodemographic change and known crime correlates. Specifically, this study uses residual change scores and multiple linear regression to examine county-level changes between ONG activity and known Part I criminal offenses between 2009 and 2019 among the counties in Texas. This study adds to the existing rural crime and boomtown literature because it is the first to use residual change scores to assess whether ONG activity contributes to any change in the known Part I crimes or social change variables. The results of this study indicate that six dynamic measures of ONG significantly affect change in specific known Part I offenses, thereby supporting the argument that failure to control for processes of change may lead to specification bias issues that are reflected in previous studies exploring the impact of ONG production on crime rates.

Building on original research into the petroleum industry and on the theory of crimes of globalization, this book introduces the concept of Market Criminology: the criminology of preventable market-generated harms and the criminogenic effects of market rationality in variegated forms of capitalism. Ifeanyi Ezeonu explores the ascendance of the fundamentalist form of market economy in Nigeria; the complicity of the state political and security apparatuses in the corporate expropriation of the country's petroleum resource wealth; the deleterious effects of this neoliberal architecture on the local population, as well as community resistance strategies over the years. This book offers a major contribution to research on state-corporate crime and the crimes of the powerful. Key reading for scholars and students in the areas of criminology, international political economy and sociology, this book will also be rich resource for researchers and non-governmental agencies working in the areas of environmental protection, human rights and sustainable development in the Global South, especially the Sub-Saharan Africa.

Cleaning up Greenwash characterizes corporate environmental crime as an inevitable consequence of neoliberal markets and contemporary consumer culture and identifies that traditional criminal justice responses may be inadequate to deal with contemporary environmental harms.