Police corruption and organizational structures: An ethicist's view

Structural explanations have provided those within the social sciences with a more penetrating look at the dynamic and interactional forces that bear upon human behavior. This has been especially disclosing in criminal justice where such an approach has quite dramatically shown that corrupt practices arise through the evolution of an infrastructure within police departments. By taking a radical departure from the current orthodoxy, this paper will argue that structural explanation has its place in a discussion of human behavior. When overextended, however, as it is in the present literature on police corruption, it reaches unsound theoretical conclusions that neglect the self and express a disdain for the personal which runs counter to ethical standards and considerations.