ho received them, the voters and the democratic process itself. B. F. Goodrich's defective braking systems on military aircraft threatened the lives of users including airforce personnel and cheated taxpayers.
Crimes by governmental organizations may victimize an even broader range of persons. The Nazi Holocaust resulted in the genocide of entire races, Jews and others. The My Lai massacre victimized the innocent civilian inhabitants of a South Vietnamese village. The Challenger space shuttle explosion in 1986 which resulted from defectively designed O-ring seals killed seven astronauts.
Although the readings indicate that often large organizations get off lightly with relatively minor penalties and individual employee culprits are rarely imprisoned, the organizations involved can suffer substantial damage to their reputation. My Lai drew into question the integrity of the U.S. military's actions in Vietnam. NASA's space shuttle program has never fully recovered from the public revelations of organizational and individual failures in permitting the launch of Challenger. Johns-Manville faced such high legal costs and financial losses that it eventually elected to file for protection under the bankruptcy laws.
Not to be overlooked are the long term corrupting effects and personal tragedies suffered by high level corporate or governmental officials who engaged in corporate crime and the concealment thereof. Employees who expose such crimes can suffer devastating internal pressures to conform and ostracism by their colleagues if they refuse to go along and possible loss of their jobs, damage to their career prospects and high legal costs.
2. Elements of Structural and Elite Crime; Difficulties of Proof.
Sutherland (1996) defined elite or white collar crime as "a crime committed by persons of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation" (p. 83). A structural crime involves patterns of organizatio...