Behind Bars;

 

TAPED TO THE FRONT DOOR AT THE Justice Department's Environmental Crimes Unit in Washington is a cartoon showing a business executive speaking to five others at a conference table: "There you have it, gentlemen -- the upside potential is tremendous, but the downside risk is jail."

The cartoon is a reminder to prosecutors that if corporate officials willfully violate the environmental laws, the downside risk should become a reality. It wasn't always that way.

Enactment of a framework of laws to punish willful polluters with jail terms began with the 1972 Clean Water Act. But the criminal provisions of the laws were rarely enforced. The Reagan Administration got only 123 indictments against corporations or their top executives for pollution violations from 1982 to 1982. But in the first nine months of this fiscal year, the number of indictments under the pollution laws and general criminal statutes soared to 82.

Most of the cases involve small or midsize businesses. Judson W. Starr, director of the Environmental Crimes Unit, estimates that 90% of individuals who are indicted are convicted, and one in five of these people land behind bars.

Recent cases have involved a Waterbury, Conn., demolition company that failed to remove asbestos before tearing down a house, and a Seattle janitorial firm that discharged wasted into a river without a permit. A North Carolina chief executive officer has served the stiffest sentence to date, two and a half years for dumping toxic chemicals.

Some environmentalists see the crackdown as a welcome but limited response to the widely publicized Environmental Protection Agency abuses of a few years ago. "That's flat wrong," counters F. Henry Habicht II, assistant attorney general for the Land and Natural Resources division in the Justice Department. He says Justice targeted environmental criminals -- "egregious wrongdoers" -- before the EPA brouhaha began.