Criminals must preserve self-respect by sanitizing and deflecting blame for misconduct.

Evidence

Those taking part in the scheme also had the vexing psychological problem of how to retain their self-respect while engaging in criminal conduct. This required sanitizing the illegal behavior and diminishing personal responsibility for it. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1388

Categorization

• XREF: Core causal claim of the whole book - that harm-doers cannot sustain wrongdoing without moral self-justification, directly paralleling how ordinary citizens rationalize supporting exclusionary policy. — connects to: Police treatment teaches stopped citizens their own worthiness of respect — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 506; Desire to punish offenders should amplify the denial of their agency.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1388