STRUCTURAL AND ELITE CRIME

1. Victims of Structural and Elite Crime. Victims of structural and elite crime cover a wide gamut. The most obvious victims of many crimes committed by large corporations are customers whose health or economic wellbeing are thereby adversely effected. A good example of customer victims were the purchasers of Ford Pintos in the 1970s which were killed or injured in fires arising out of rear end collisions as a result of defectively designed fuel tanks. Another was the women who suffered death or illness toxic shock syndrome after using Rely Tampons containing dangerous synthetic substances which were produced by Procter & Gamble in the 70s. Sometimes the damages to consumers take the form of higher prices such as occurred as a result of the price-fixing conspiracies in which were General Electric, Westinghouse and others were engaged before the 1960s.

Other victims of corporate crime include innocent persons such as the Indians killed or injured by the explosion in 1984 of Union Carbide's Bhopal plant which spread toxic liquid methyl isocyanate over a broad area. Employees who were unable to flee because of inadequate exits and sprinkler systems were the victims of the fire which occurred in 1991 at the Imperial Food plant in North Carolina. Employees and an

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ho occupy these positions" (pp. 4-5). These impersonal and anonymous structures in which employees at all levels think of themselves as cogs in a machine facilitate deviant behavior in several ways. Everything including respect for the law and ethical norms tends to become subsumed to overriding corporate objectives, such as profit maximization, the protection of the stability of the entity itself, technological imperatives and rigid procedures which block the free flow of information within the organization concerning possibly questionable conduct. In their discussion of the Challenger disaster, Boisjoly et al identify various structural impediments in the management hierarchies of NASA and Morton Thiokol, the manufacturer of the defective O-rings which contributed to the explosion after launch of the spacecraft: "the well-documented pathologies of bureaucratic behavior (e.g. lack of communication, distortion of information as it passes up the hierarchy, jealousy of existing lines of authority, bias in favor of the status quo, bureaucratic turf protection, power games, inclination to view the public interest through the distorted lens of vested interests" (1996, p. 228). The heavy investments required in modern technolog
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Approximate Word count = 4355
Approximate Pages = 17 (250 words per page)

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