Kathryne Young - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Kathryne Young

Punishment & society, Apr 23, 2024

Sociological Perspectives, Sep 2, 2021

First-generation and working-class undergraduates not only experience mental health problems at h... more First-generation and working-class undergraduates not only experience mental health problems at higher rates than their more affluent peers, but are also less likely to seek treatment. We administered a mixed-methods survey to undergraduates at two institutions to investigate the relationship between cultural capital and mental health decision-making. Using two measures of cultural capital, we find that students with high cultural capital are more likely to seek mental health treatment than those with limited cultural capital. Additionally, analysis of our qualitative results reveals that while students with limited cultural capital make treatment decisions through a collectivistic lens (considering other people’s needs and opinions), those with high cultural capital tend to view treatment decisions through an individualistic lens (considering their own needs and opinions). These lenses capture both the barriers and facilitators to mental health care that students cite to explain their decision-making. Understanding how cultural capital shapes orientations to mental health care is necessary to facilitate help-seeking for students from all social class backgrounds.

Law & Society Review, Jan 29, 2020

The authors thank Rebecca Sandefur and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful feedback, Dav... more The authors thank Rebecca Sandefur and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful feedback, David Sklansky and Robert Weisberg for discussions about the legal implications of this project, Emma Aulenback for her research assistance, and several instructors who generously allowed us to distribute surveys in their courses.

In examining what role privatization should serve in California criminal justice reform, this art... more In examining what role privatization should serve in California criminal justice reform, this article approaches privatization as a structural tool for systemic improvement, rather than simply a way to replicate existing structures more cheaply. In addition to making several policy suggestions, the article identifies the most significant aspects of the California criminal justice system upon which privatization would bear.

Fordham Law Review, 2021

Previous work on law student wellness and mental health strongly suggests that the seeds of profe... more Previous work on law student wellness and mental health strongly suggests that the seeds of professional unhappiness are sown in law school. Law students suffer from anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and other mental health problems at alarmingly high rates. They also leave law school with different concerns, commitments, and cognitive patterns than when they entered, emerging less hopeful, less intrinsically motivated, and more concerned with prestige than they were at the outset. So what, exactly, happens to people in law school? Although a rich body of quantitative and survey-based research on law students documents these empirical trends, surprisingly little qualitative work has examined the social mechanisms and relational processes that underpin the development of negative mental health and wellness patterns. This Article draws on in-depth interviews with fiftythree law students from thirty-six law schools throughout the United States: one interview before the students started law school, then another interview in their first three to six weeks, for a total of 106 interviews with 1L students who entered law school in Fall 2020. Even at this early stage, we can already begin to identify the social and cognitive processes that set the stage for unhealthy professional development. I. WHAT HAPPENS IN LAW SCHOOL? Students enter law school with unexceptional psychological profiles: on average, they are no more or no less happy or healthy than demographically similar peers who are not in law school. But by graduation, they emerge less

$Research paper thumbnail of Parole Hearings and Victims\u27 Rights: Implementation, Ambiguity, and Reform$

Despite the increasing recognition of victims\u27 rights, and despite the large role parole heari... more Despite the increasing recognition of victims\u27 rights, and despite the large role parole hearings play in the criminal justice system, discussion of the intersection between these two issues has been curiously sparse. Across the United States, victim participation in parole hearings is currently expanding, yet little is known about how this participation operates on the ground. This Article uses a Calfornia victims\u27 rights initiative called Marsy\u27s Law to think critically about the role that crime victims and their loved ones should play in parole hearings. I use in-depth interviews with California releasing authorities to describe the implementation of Marsy\u27s Law and its effects on parole hearings for lifer inmates. While this Article details victims\u27 actual participation in the parole process, it is even more usefully read as an article about how we think about victims\u27 participation in parole. To this end, victims\u27 rights are relevant both as individual lega...

UC Irvine law review, Feb 1, 2021

Law & Social Inquiry

One in seven people in prison in the US is serving a life sentence, and most of these people will... more One in seven people in prison in the US is serving a life sentence, and most of these people will eventually be eligible for discretionary parole release. Yet parole hearings are notoriously understudied. With only a handful of exceptions, few researchers have considered the ways in which race shapes decision-makers’ perception of parole candidates. We use a data set created from over seven hundred California lifer parole hearing transcripts to examine the factors that predict parole commissioners’ decisions. We find significant racial disparities in outcomes, with Black parole candidates less likely to receive parole grants than white parole candidates, and test two possible indirect mechanisms. First, we find that racial disparity is unassociated with differences in rehabilitative efforts of Black versus white parole candidates, suggesting that differential levels of self-rehabilitation are not responsible for the disparity. Second, we test the hypothesis that racial disparity owe...

Despite the increasing recognition of victims' rights, and despite the large role parole hearings... more Despite the increasing recognition of victims' rights, and despite the large role parole hearings play in the criminal justice system, discussion of the intersection between these two issues has been curiously sparse. Across the United States, victim participation in parole hearings is currently expanding, yet little is known about how this participation operates on the ground. This Article uses a California victims' rights initiative called "Marsy's Law" to think critically about the role that crime victims and their loved ones should play in parole hearings. I use in-depth interviews with California releasing authorities to describe the implementation of Marsy's Law and its effects on parole hearings for lifer inmates. While this Article details victims' actual participation in the parole process, it is even more usefully read as an article about how we think about victims' participation in parole. To this end, "victims' rights" are relevant both as individual legal entitlements and as broader political objectives. Toward the end of this Article, I identify several areas of possible policy reform with national implications. The data and analysis reveal an urgent need to identify the true purposes of victim testimony and align these purposes with parole hearing procedures. I argue that hearings could be better tailored to meet the most pressing needs of releasing authorities, offenders, and victims themselves.

California Law Review, 2016

This article analyzes the sociolegal significance of a highly localized form of illegal behavior:... more This article analyzes the sociolegal significance of a highly localized form of illegal behavior: the Hawaiian cockfight. Drawing on ethnographic data gathered at illegal cockfights in Hawaii, as well as in-depth confidential interviews of cockfighters, this article depicts the activity as it occurs on the ground, from the fighters’ perspective. The men who engage in cockfighting derive at least two meanings from the illegal activity. First, cockfighting expresses a man’s central identity as a Hawaii “local,” embodying a positive cultural assertion that honors cockfighters’ family histories and establishes a man’s value as an intelligent, trustworthy member of his community. Second, in the throes of legal, economic, and demographic changes to Hawaii, cockfighting has taken on an important meaning as a “resistance” activity that stands in opposition to these developments, particularly because of the pervasive sense of futility that locals tend to experience when they interact with th...

Although scholarly attention has been devoted to the argument that Batson v. Kentucky should appl... more Although scholarly attention has been devoted to the argument that Batson v. Kentucky should apply to gay and lesbian jurors, little or no attention has been paid to how these challenges would work in practice. This article is, foremost, a thought experiment about how peremptory challenges would function if Batson were applied to sexual orientation. I examine several scenarios to understand the practical implications of this change and conclude that it would be ineffective at best and socially appalling at worst. My analysis reveals a fundamental problem with the current peremptory system: it fails to take into account the complex nature of social identity and the psychological realities of human interaction and bias. The goal of equal protection, I suggest, would be better served if changes were made to the existing peremptory challenge system, such as reducing the number of challenges allowed and requiring a Batson-style explanation for every peremptory challenge exercised.

South Carolina Law Review, 2014

This Article empirically examines questions of rights knowledge and rights assertion in order to ... more This Article empirically examines questions of rights knowledge and rights assertion in order to better understand the processes that contribute to people's assertions of their Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment rights. Using quantitative and qualitative results from survey data, we test some of the assumptions about rights knowledge and rights assertion that are embedded in United States Supreme Court opinions. Our findings suggest that not only do people, by and large, not know their rights, but that when they try to figure out which rights they possess, the current procedural regime leads them to perform even worse than chance. Rights knowledge is not correlated with demographic factors such as race, social class, or even prior experience as a subject of criminal investigation. Furthermore, we find that a sense of personal efficacy in police-citizen interactions, specifically the willingness to assert rights, is positively correlated with social position. That is, people in h...

This Review argues that an important root cause of our criminal justice ails can be found in the ... more This Review argues that an important root cause of our criminal justice ails can be found in the social processes that comprise the system’s daily activities and forms of control over individual Americans — processes largely taken for granted. To explore the ground level interpersonal interactions that underpin the criminal justice system, we engage three recent books: Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship by Professors Charles Epp, Steven Maynard-Moody, and Donald Haider-Markel; On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Professor Alice Goffman; and The Eternal Criminal Record by Professor James Jacobs. Substantively and methodologically, the books might first seem an odd trio. But together, they reveal the importance of a key phenomenon: “surveillance” in the word’s broadest sense — keeping track of people’s movements, histories, relationships, homes, and activities.

This Article analyzes the sociolegal significance of a highly localized form of illegal behavior:... more This Article analyzes the sociolegal significance of a highly localized form of illegal behavior: the Hawaiian cockfight. Drawing on ethnographic data gathered at illegal cockfights in Hawaii, and in-depth confidential interviews of cockfighters, I depict this crime as it occurs on the ground, from the perpetrators’ perspective. Cockfighting has at least two meanings in the lives of men who engage in it. First, it functions as a means of expressing an identity as a "local" of Hawaii, embodying a positive cultural assertion that honors perpetrators’ family histories and establishes perpetrators’ value as intelligent, trustworthy members of the local community. Second, in the throes of legal, economic, and demographic changes to Hawaii, cockfighting has become a "resistance" activity that stands in opposition to these developments, particularly because of the overarching sense of futility locals experience with regard to the legal system. These two purposes, identi...