# Adam Fine

Adam Fine is a developmental psychologist whose research predominately focuses on the juvenile justice system and juvenile delinquency. He is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University.

## Education

Fine received his B.A. in Psychology from Georgetown University in 2012. As an undergraduate student, Fine conducted research on the interaction between early childhood education and child welfare, especially within the Maryland Foster Care System Population, through his honors thesis entitled Predicting the Child Care Experiences of Foster Children: An Ecological Study of Maryland Foster Families under the mentorship of Dr. Deborah Phillips and Dr. Beth Meloy.
He attended graduate school, at the University of California, Irvine, where he obtained his Masters of Arts in Social Ecology (2015) and Ph.D. in Psychology and Social Behavior with concentrations in Developmental Psychology and Quantitative Methods (2018). His dissertation entitled Respect and Obey: The Development of Adolescents’ Perceptions of the Police and the Law tackled the idea of how a juvenile’s perception of legal authorities and the law affects their inclination to break the law. Fine conducted this research under the mentorship of Dr. Elizabeth Cauffman, Dr. Chuansheng Chen, and Dr. Nicholas Scurich.

## Career

Following his graduation from the University of California-Irvine, Fine was hired as an assistant professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University (ASU). Additionally, he serves as an affiliated faculty member in the Program on Law and Behavioral Sciences as well as with the Center for Correctional Solutions. Fine is involved as a research mentor for Masters and Doctoral level candidates, where he assists them through their thesis or dissertation journeys. Fine has been nominated for the Outstanding Doctoral Mentor Award and was a finalist for the Outstanding Master’s Mentor Award at Arizona State University. Fine was a recipient of the 2023 National Science Foundation's Faculty Early Career Development Program $669,618 grant which he will use to explore new ways to empower youth to thrive beyond the juvenile justice system through the Integrated Youth Development Model.

## Community outreach

Fine serves as the director of the Youth Justice Lab at Arizona State University’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, which aims to conduct research regarding juvenile justice. The team collaborates with politicians and other involved parties to address issues within our justice system. The Justice Lab offers tutoring services to youth involved in the juvenile justice system in Maricopa, Mohave, Pima, and Pinal counties, which are funded by a grant the lab received from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
Additionally, Fine is involved with the Team Kids Organization as an independent investigator who works to evaluate the program's effectiveness. Through this organization, Fine works to research how youth’s interaction with law enforcement agencies affects their likelihood of criminality and their overall trust in the justice system. Through the team's hard work, the Team Kids Organization Challenge is empirically validated by its publishing in the American Psychological Association Journal of Psychology. Lastly, Fine was interviewed by PBS Arizona in 2020 for his research into examining children’s perception of police through the lens of the Team Kids Organization.

## Research

Fine’s research focuses mainly on the critical issues with the Juvenile Justice System and juvenile delinquency. His research interests involve the impact of justice system processes on the overall experience of involved youth and how youth and the community develop their perceptions of our legal systems.
Specifically, Fine and his colleagues conducted a longitudinal study on how the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter Movement affected the community's perception of the fairness of our police and justice system. The study found that these events led to a decline in the legitimacy of the police and judicial processes in the eyes of the community.
Fine, in collaboration with Benjamin Van Rooji, wrote The Behavioral Code: The Hidden Ways Law Makes Us Better or Worse, which looks at the hidden forces and root causes that drive human behavior and our responses to laws set by our society. The book offers an alternative way to battling crime by exploring the importance of understanding the science of human misconduct in order to decrease our system's focus on punitive ways for crime deterrence. The authors were awarded the 2023 Lawrence S. Wrightsman Book Award from the American Psychology-Law Society, which is intended to recognize outstanding scholarship in psychology and law. Additionally, it was a finalist for the American Bar Associations Silver Gavel Award in 2022.

## Books

Van Rooji, B., Fine, A (2022) The Behavioral Code: The Hidden Ways Law Makes Us Better or Worse Beacon Press.