Adam Fine

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Assistant) at Arizona State University

During adolescence, youths develop attitudes about the justice system. Although there is consistent evidence that personal experiences with legal actors contribute to attitudes toward the justice system, adolescents' attitudes may also be influenced vicariously through their friends' experiences with the justice system. Using data from a sample of...

Purpose: Controversial encounters between racial minorities and law enforcement have led to increased public discourse surrounding race and law enforcement in the United States. A "racial gap" in perceptions of law enforcement exists and appears to be growing. Researchers have not adequately examined how political preference may contribute to diver...

The way police officers interact with individuals fundamentally impacts the public’s perceptions of law enforcement. Such perceptions are, in turn, linked to a variety of key outcomes, including crime commission, crime reporting, and the willingness to be a witness. Considering that the way children perceive the police may set the tone for how they...

The COVID-19 mitigation measures require a fundamental shift in human behavior. The present study assesses what factors influence Americans to comply with the stay at home and social distancing measures. It analyzes data from an online survey, conducted on April 3, 2020, of 570 participants from 35 states that have adopted such measures. The result...

Objective Examine youths’ perceptions of police legitimacy. Study one establishes age-graded trends in perceptions from childhood into adolescence. Study two tests whether a structured, in-school, non-enforcement-related program involving repeated prosocial exposure to police can improve youths’ perceptions of police legitimacy.Methods In study one...

Objective: Beyond traditional in-person meetings, contemporary juvenile probation officers (JPOs) leverage modern technology to interact with youth via videoconferencing, phone calls, and text messaging. It is plausible that youth feel more—or less—supported by JPOs depending on the format of their interactions. Simultaneously, the procedural justi...

Objectives: Beyond traditional in-person meetings, contemporary juvenile probation officers (JPOs) leverage modern technology to interact with youth via videoconferencing, phone calls, and text messaging. It is plausible that youth feel more – or less – supported by JPOs depending on the format of their interactions. Simultaneously, the procedural...

Purpose Due to instances of excessive use of force by police and in recognition of the importance of building positive police-community relationships, policymakers have urged police to become more guardian-oriented (i.e., prioritizing community safety and relationships) and less warrior-oriented (i.e., prioritizing physical control and fighting cri...

Objectives: The police killing of George Floyd energized the Black Lives Matter (BLM) social movement across the United States in the summer of 2020. We test the impact on public perceptions of the fairness and legitimacy of the police and law. Methods: A four-state, three-wave, short-term longitudinal study ( N = 1048; Arizona, Michigan, New York,...

Objective This experimental study examined if people are more willing to cooperate with police after police apologize and provide a plan of action to prevent wrongdoing in the future. It also tested if prior procedural justice perceptions moderate the effect. Methods Adults (N = 536) were randomly assigned to read a police apology vignette with or...

To solve crime, police rely on the public’s willingness to cooperate (WTC). While scholarship has focused on how people’s current perceptions of police might impact their willingness to cooperate, it is likely that their future views might also matter. Specifically, this study tested the hypothesis that people’s hope in future police procedural jus...

Juvenile probation can be a critical inflection point. As such, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners are interested in enhancing youths' success on probation, especially pertaining to reducing recidivism and promoting their success in education and employment. Informed by the risk-need-responsivity framework, the present study examined how...

We examined the developmental and situation-specific differences between four groupings of adolescents charged with a first offense: those who committed the crime and told the authorities they committed the crime (true confessors; 71%), those who committed the crime but told the authorities they did not commit the crime (false deniers; 8%), those w...

The juvenile justice system can process youth in myriad ways. Youth who are formally processed, relative to being informally processed, may experience more public and harsh sanctions that label youth more negatively as “deviant.” Drawing on labeling theory, the current study evaluates the relative effect of formal justice system processing on the i...

Objective: Our goal in the present study was to use longitudinal data to assess how normative (i.e., consensually motivated) and instrumental (i.e., coercively motivated) obligation to obey police changed after police murdered George Floyd and whether these changes differed by political ideology. Hypotheses: Using procedural justice theory, we hypo...

In addition to training law enforcement personnel in strategies to promote positive youth-police interactions, equipping youth with similar knowledge is critical in ensuring safe and effective youth-police encounters. The classroom-based Juvenile Justice Curriculum was designed to equip young people with knowledge about the law and their rights and...

Ethnic-racial minority adolescents experience accelerated premature aging (e.g., epigenetic aging) and are disproportionately stopped by the police. To protect their children against the physiological stress linked to police intrusion, fathers may enact their ethnic-racial identities, which may implicitly shape their parenting beliefs and practices...

Youth-police contact is frequent and can have seriously harmful consequences. To improve youth-police relations, it is important to equip both police and youth with the tools needed to encourage the safest interactions. Few programs exist to educate youth about the law or how to interact with police. We used a mixed-methods approach to evaluate a s...

Objective: We assessed the factors that legitimized the police in the United States at an important moment of history, just after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020. We also evaluated one way of incorporating perceptions of systemic racism into procedural justice theory. Hypotheses: We tested two primary hypotheses. The first hypothesis was...

In the spring and summer of 2020, police in the United States killed Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and other unarmed people of color. In one of the largest social movements in the nation’s history, thousands engaged in public protests and called to defund or abolish the police. Debate about police racism and the need for reform intensified, with pub...

Objective Test how virtual, vicarious exposure to a procedurally just versus unjust police traffic stop impacts youths’ perceptions of police legitimacy and willingness to cooperate. Methods Adolescents (N = 822) were randomly assigned to watch a video featuring a procedurally just interaction, a procedurally unjust interaction, or no video. Analy...

This study evaluated 190 adolescent–parent dyads from two US sites (CA and TX) about their awareness of and attitudes toward adolescent sexting and age of sexual consent policies. Findings indicate (a) poor policy awareness among adolescents and parents, particularly for the Texas sample, (b) positive associations between parent and adolescent awar...

The procedural justice framework suggests that negative perceptions of the police are linked to crime-related behavior. General strain theory could illuminate a key mechanism; negative perceptions of the police might undermine the obligation to obey laws and rules through promoting strain and psychological distress. This study integrated these two...

To understand how compliance develops both in everyday and corporate environments, it is crucial to understand how different mechanisms work together to shape individuals’ (non)compliant behavior. Existing compliance studies typically focus on a subset of theories (i.e., rational choice theories, social theories, legitimacy theories, capacity theor...

In the spring and summer of 2020, police in the U.S. killed Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and other unarmed people of colors. Thousands across the country engaged in public protests and called to defund or abolish the police, constituting one of the largest social movements in the nation’s history. Public views on the Black Lives Matter movement are...

Some communities are choosing to implement programs that enable police and youth to engage with each other within voluntary and non-enforcement-related contexts, yet little is known about the impacts of such programs on officers. As part of a larger program evaluation, this study examines police officers’ perceptions of participating in a community...

The present study sought to unravel the psychological processes through which mass incarceration, specifically paternal incarceration, is negatively affecting the next generation of children. Data came from 4,327 families from 20 cities who participated in a 10-year longitudinal study. Parents and children reported on children’s rule-breaking behav...

Police must rely on the public, however youths’ views of police are historically low. To understand the dynamics of these intergroup relations, this study integrates two theoretical perspectives: the cognitive developmental perspective, which posits that age-graded cognitive enhancements enable children to begin critically evaluating police, and th...

Introduction: Definitions regarding defunding or abolishing the police are highly contested in the United States. Moreover, adolescents' definitions and how socialization processes shape their definitions are unclear. Methods: Within a national sample of 822 adolescents ages 13-17 (49.69% female; 63.22% White, 16.93% Black/African American, 11.0...

Police departments are becoming increasingly homogenous as they struggle to recruit demographically diverse officers with desirable characteristics. Youths’ exposure to police brutality on social media may decrease their perceptions of police and interest in policing careers. Despite adolescents being the future pool of police applicants, social me...

While perceptions of the legitimacy of formal authority have been found to influence offending, little is known about the extent to which such perceptions influence the related outcome of victimization. This study addressed this gap by examining how changes in legitimacy affected victimization both within- and between-individuals. This study used 7...

The literature on perceptions of police is growing, yet the enthusiasm is outpacing methodological rigor. This study: 1) examined the factor structure of items assessing procedural justice and legitimacy; 2) tested whether the factors were uniquely associated with youth self-reported offending (SRO); and 3) identified whether effects on subsequent...

A crucial question in the governance of infectious disease outbreaks is how to ensure that people continue to adhere to mitigation measures for the longer duration. The present paper examines this question by means of a set of cross-sectional studies conducted in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, in May, June, and July of 2020. Using...

A popular model of legal socialization contends that interactions with authority figures impact the internalization of pro-social values and beliefs, including authority legitimacy. Simultaneously, subcultural theories, including the code of the street, emphasize that negative contextual and experiential factors promote subcultural beliefs. The cur...

Despite the Task Force on 21st Century Policing explicitly calling for police to engage youth in positive, non-enforcement contexts, studies have not systematically examined the impacts of such programs on positive youth development (PYD). These two studies examined the impact of a community-driven program that enables children to work collaborativ...

Objective Ethnic-racial minority children in the United States are more likely to experience father loss to incarceration than White children, and limited research has examined the health implications of these ethnic-racial disparities. Telomere length is a biomarker of chronic stress that is predictive of adverse health outcomes. We examined wheth...

Objective: Although researchers, policymakers, and practitioners recognize the importance of the public’s perceptions of police, few studies have examined developmental trends in adolescents and young adults’ views of police. Hypotheses: Hypothesis 1: Perceptions of police legitimacy would exhibit a U-shaped curve, declining in adolescence before i...

The current study advances past research by studying the impact of juvenile justice decision making with a geographically and ethnically diverse sample (N = 1,216) of adolescent boys (ages 13–17 years) for the 5 years following their first arrest. Importantly, all youth in the study were arrested for an eligible offense of moderate severity (e.g.,...

Objective: To examine whether at-risk male youth experience increases in anxiety, depressive symptoms, and aggression during years when they are exposed to gun violence, adjusting for relevant covariates. Method: Participants were 1,216 male, justice-involved adolescents who were recently arrested for the first time for a moderate offense. They wer...

Objectives. Bring people’s perceptions of systemic racism into procedural justice theory. Test an expanded model of police legitimacy that includes people’s perceptions of the under-policing and over-policing of Black communities. Methods. A cross-sectional survey based on a quota sample of 1,500 US residents designed to resemble the general popula...

During the emergence of the legal socialization field, the obligation to obey the law was central in theoretical and empirical approaches. Scholars in the last 50 years often noted that the obligation to obey the law (OOL) is vital for compliance, yet studies rarely empirically examined factors that promote the OOL. This study used data from 1000 a...

Adults’ facial characteristics predict whether and how severely they are sentenced in the adult criminal justice system. We investigate whether characteristics of White and Latinx male youths’ faces predict the severity of their processing in the juvenile justice system. Among a sample of first-time offenders, despite no differences in the severity...

Objective: Based on guiding principles such as parens patriae, juvenile probation officers (JPOs) not only supervise youth, but in certain jurisdictions they also decide how control-oriented their conditions will be. JPOs' perceptions of parenting could be related to their decision making. This study examined: (a) whether JPOs' perceptions of the...

Background: Despite their positive intention to increase school safety, zero-tolerance policies may perpetuate racial disparities in health. Zero tolerance refers to school policies and practices that mandate predetermined punishment in response to student misbehavior regardless of the context or rationale for the behavior. Black children are subje...

Objective This study examines the effects of dynamic risk factors on handgun carrying from adolescence into young adulthood. Method A nationally representative sample of 8,679 individuals (ages 12–26; 51.1% male; 58% White, 26.8% African American; 21.2% Hispanic ethnicity) from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1997 cohort) interviewed at...

Despite surging interest in legal socialization, it is unclear how youth develop legal cynicism. The present study examined two socialization mechanisms for youth legal cynicism: perceptions of police treatment and maternal legal cynicism. Additionally, we assessed the degree to which an adolescent’s legal cynicism predicts reoffending. Youth and t...

In the month of May, the Netherlands moved out of the “intelligent lockdown”, and into the “1.5 meter society”, which aims to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic by means of safe-distance measures. This paper assesses how Dutch citizens have complied with these social distancing measures. It analyses data from two surveys conducted in May (between 8-14...

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Dutch government has introduced an “intelligent lockdown” with stay at home and social distancing measures. The Dutch approach to mitigate the virus focuses less on repression and more on moral appeals and self-discipline. This study assessed how compliance with the measures have worked out in practice and...

The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly influenced daily life all over the world. The present study assesses what factors influenced inhabitants of the United Kingdom to comply with lockdown and social distancing measures. It analyses data from an online survey, conducted on April 6-8, 2020, amongst a nationally representative sample of 555 participants...

In its most general sense, legal socialization refers to the process through which individuals develop values, attitudes, and beliefs about laws, the institutions that create law, and the people that enforce law (Finckenauer, 1998; Trinkner & Cohn, 2014). While seminal works in the field (e.g., Cohn & White, 1990; Tapp & Levine, 1974) referred to i...

Objective: Anderson's (1999) "code of the street" (CoS) framework posits that exposure to violence (ETV) is linked to violent offending through youth adopting the CoS. This study quantitatively examines this mediation, as well as the additional mediating role of youths' perceptions of police. Method: This study used a racially/ethnically diverse sa...

Purpose Legal socialization is the study of how individuals develop their attitudes towards the law and its authorities. While research on perceptions of legal authorities has increased, studies have not adequately examined developmental trends in youths’ obligation to obey the law in particular. Methods This study uses a cross-sectional sample of...

Recent unjust interactions between law enforcement and youth of color may have provoked a “crisis” in American law enforcement. Utilizing Monitoring the Future’s data on distinct, cross-sectional cohorts of 12th graders from each year spanning 1976–2016, we examined whether youth perceptions of law enforcement have changed. We also traced youth wor...

Recent unjust interactions between law enforcement and youth of color may have provoked a “crisis” in American law enforcement. Utilizing Monitoring the Future’s data on distinct, cross-sectional cohorts of 12th graders from each year spanning 1976-2016, we examined whether youth perceptions of law enforcement have changed. We also traced youth wor...

This study examined the extent to which being arrested during adolescence was associated with subsequent self-reported offending and court-recorded arrests. We also examined whether the way in which the justice system processed adolescents was related to the nature of these associations. The sample included 532 boys who had been arrested ("justice-...

It is widely believed that there is a crisis of confidence in law enforcement in the United States. What remains to be seen, however, is whether adolescents actually differentiate between legal authorities and other types of authorities. Leveraging cross-sectional, nationally representative data of 12th graders from every year from 2006 to 2017 fro...

Best practices in juvenile probation focus on individualized treatment, yet youths' perceptions of the role probation should play (e.g., law enforcement) have been largely overlooked in this process. This study used self-reported data from 110 racially/ethnically diverse youthful probationers in 2 jurisdictions. The youth reported their perceptions...

This daily diary study examined how adolescents’ institutional and teacher‐specific trust predicted classroom behavioral engagement the day after being disciplined by that teacher. Within mathematics classrooms, adolescents (N = 190; Mage = 14 years) reported institutional and teacher‐specific trust and then completed a 15‐day diary assessing teach...

Juvenile justice facilities can be dangerous places for adolescents and may promote violent behavior among incarcerated youth. With high rates of violence among detained juveniles, youth who do not feel safe may resort to violent behavior to protect themselves. However, this cycle of violence may be interrupted if youth can turn to correctional sta...

Callous‐unemotional (CU) traits are a risk factor for severe and persistent patterns of juvenile delinquency. Given the influence of CU trait assessments in justice‐system settings, it is important to determine whether the predictive utility of CU traits is conditional on the absence of protective psychosocial factors. Employing a sample of justice...

There is widespread recognition that organizational culture matters in corporations involved in systemic crime and wrongdoing. However, we know far less about how to assess and alter toxic elements within a corporate culture. The present paper draws on management science, anthropology, sociology of law, criminology, and social psychology to explain...

This study investigates the association between undocumented immigration and crime among youthful offenders. Using official record and self-reported offending measures collected across seven-waves of data from the longitudinal Crossroads Study, the prevalence and variety of offending are compared for undocumented immigrant, documented immigrant, an...

Adolescents with juvenile justice system experience may be enrolled into alternative schools to increase academic success or to reduce delinquency. This study used longitudinal data on a racially/ethnically diverse sample of 1,216 male, first-time adolescent offenders to examine how youthful offenders’ school experiences were associated with academ...

Youth with poor self-regulation or criminal attitudes are at risk for recidivism. Researchers have yet to examine how self-regulation and criminal attitudes intermix to influence recidivism. The present study employed a large sample of 26,947 youth in the Florida Juvenile Justice System to examine the effect of criminal attitudes on the association...

Adolescents who view the justice system negatively are prone to commit crime. Simultaneously, youth who have difficulty regulating their behavior are likely to commit crime. Using a longitudinal sample of 1,216 male adolescents (ages 13–17) who had been arrested for the first time, were racially/ethnically diverse, and were drawn from three U.S. st...

Adolescent first-time offenders demonstrate greater risk of continued offending, justice system contact, and high school dropout. The current study evaluates if optimistic expectations protect youth by reducing offending and improving school grades for 3 years following a first arrest (N = 1,165, Mage = 15.29). This article also considers whether i...

This study examines whether (1) mothers vary in the way they express hostility toward their delinquent adolescent offspring, (2) different types of maternal hostility differentially affect adolescents’ depression and recidivism, and (3) adolescent depression serves as a mechanism through which maternal hostility predicts later reoffending. The samp...

Social ecological theories and decades of supporting research suggest that contexts exert a powerful influence on adolescent delinquency. Individual traits, such as impulse control, also pose a developmental disadvantage to adolescents through increasing risk of delinquency. However, such individual differences may also predispose some youth to str...

Deterrence threats are essential mechanisms for affecting behavior, yet they are often ineffective. The literature is beginning to consider individual differences underlying differential susceptibility to deterrence. The present study sampled 223 adults from Amazon Mechanical Turk and used an experimental cheating paradigm to examine the role of 3...

Youth who hold negative attitudes toward the justice system are more likely to engage in crime. It is particularly important to study attitudes early in someone’s criminal career when they may still be open to change. To date, however, there has been no empirical test assessing whether the relation between attitudes and behavior changes after a fir...

When a youth is accused of committing a crime, juvenile justice system arbiters, such as probation officers, interview both the youth and the youth’s guardian to gather information before deciding to either process the youth formally or informally. Factors about a youth that are unrelated to the criminal charge may contribute to arbiters’ processin...

Both the psychological and criminological fields have long hypothesized the mechanisms that influence desistance from violent offending, but few studies have focused on violent females. We identify patterns of violent behavior across seven years among 172 females and 172 matched males ages 15 to 24, testing if heterogeneity in violent offending is...

Both environmental factors and genetic variation, particularly in genes responsible for the dopaminergic system such as DRD4, DRD2, and DAT1 (SLC6A3), affect adolescent delinquency. The school context, despite its developmental importance, has been overlooked in gene-environment research. Using data from the NICHD ECCYD, this study examined key int...

Judgments about a youth’s level of remorse are frequently used to make important decisions in the juvenile justice system that can have serious consequences to the person. Unfortunately, little is known about these ratings and what factors may influence them. In a sample of 325 1st-time youth offenders who were arrested for offenses of moderate sev...

The study of compliance has been predominantly Western, and we do not know whether existing theories and findings also apply elsewhere. As a first venture in developing a comparative view on compliance, this study seeks to gain a comparative understanding of compliance decision making amongst Chinese and American students. It studies their decision...

There is individual variation in the extent to which individuals believe it is acceptable to violate legal rules. However, we lack a specific measure that assesses this key internal element of legal decision-making and offending. This paper describes the development, validation, and testing of the Rule Orientation scale. At its core, the construct...

Although low self-control is consistently related to adolescent offending, it is unknown whether self-report measures or laboratory behavior tasks yield better predictive utility, or if a combination yields incremental predictive power. This is particularly important because developmental theory indicates that self-control is related to adolescent...

Purpose Although attitudes towards the justice system are directly related to crime commission, few studies have examined how these attitudes develop from adolescence through early adulthood. Further, despite knowledge that minority youth experience disproportionate contact with the justice system, it is unknown how legal socialization differs by r...