Attributing systemic abuse to a few bad apples protects architects from accountability

Evidence

Officials denied awareness of what was going on, absolving the upper echelon of any responsibility. Because administration officials blamed the problem on a few “bad apples,” only guards did prison time. Many of the very officials who were the architects and enablers of the costly Iraq war and the resulting abusive practices received high national honors and career advancement. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2410

Categorization

• XREF: The displacement of responsibility and scapegoating function as the rationalization mechanism backing vault claims about punitive conservatism rewarding system-preserving frames over accurate blame. — connects to: The bad-apples framing deflects blame from systemic causes; Systemic prisoner abuse is dismissed as a few bad apples to protect national self-image.
• SEED: A possible essay angle contrasting ‘bad apples’ rhetoric for police violence with the same rhetoric for Abu Ghraib, tracking how attribution style preserves institutional legitimacy across domains.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2410