The Urgency of a “Green Criminology”: A Case Study of Air Pollution, Criminal Activity and Environmental Perception in the South Durban Basin (South Africa)

17 1 Introduction Criminal behavior has been studied for centuries. Scholars and experts from dis- parate academic backgrounds have tried to “impose their own stamp on thinking” (Downes, Rock, & McLaughlin, 2016) on origins and reasons that lead on a person to commit a crime. Theories arise from the old biological ap- proaches, which hypothesized that crimi- nals could be identified by biological and physical traits, such as “small or malformed skull, pronounced and large jaw, a sloping forehead, and receding chins” (Rafter, 2008), to new contemporary biological the- ories to crime, which look at the biochemi- cal conditions, neurophysiological dam- ages, and genetic inheritance of the criminal (SCCJR, 2016). Rather, psychological theories vary: according to those, criminal behavior is due to individual reasons such as emotional dis- turbance, clinical disorders, negative child- hood development, and incomplete cogni- tive maturation (Raine, 1993), while the wider sociological approaches consider criminal behavior as a result of social fac- tors external to the individual, such as dis- organized contexts, racial heterogeneity, absence of law enforcement, and relative deprivation (Miller, 2014). The latter sug- gests the feelings of certain groups of peo- ple who “see themselves unfairly disadvan- taged compared to other individuals or groups” (SCCJR, 2016), leading to frustra- tion and resentment. On the one hand, the lack of integra- tion among the several theories mentioned above led every approach to a comprehen- sive investigation of the analyzed object, even if from only one perspective. On the other hand, this unidirectional development did not allow completely either an amal- gamation of ideas from the different aca- demic fields, or an inclusion of new ele- ments that could be responsible for criminal behavior, such as air pollution. Even if the impact of air pollution has always been assessed through a health- based risk evaluation as cancer, a recent and growing literature shows how air pollution affects negatively not only the worker productivity in physical jobs (Lavy et al., 2014), or the cognitive performance in stu- dents at school (Bharadwaj et al., 2014), but also air pollution could induce an aggres- sive and violent human response. In fact, exposure to air pollution can affect people’s life, reactions, and feelings through an in- crease of aggression, impulsiveness, irrita- bility, and a decrease of self-control (Heyes & Saberian, 2015).