“Procedural Justice, Legitimacy Beliefs, and Moral Disengagement” in Emerging Adulthood: Explaining Continuity and Desistance in the Moral Model of Criminal Lifestyle Development

Research indicates that involuntary police and court contact may affect procedural justice perceptions and legitimacy beliefs (Augustyn & Ray, 2016). These two variables were accordingly treated as control variables. Punishment certainty was also included as a control variable based on the fact deterrence and procedural justice variables were confounded in the Hawaii HOPE and Chicago PSN studies (Hawken & Kleiman, 2009; Wallace et al., 2016) so that deterrence rather than procedural justice/legitimacy may have been what contributed to the success of these programs.