K M Young
Biographic Data
| ID | 29209 |
|---|---|
| NAME | K M Young |
| GIVEN NAMES | K M |
| FAMILY NAME | Young |
| SIGNATURE | YOUNG K M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Massachusetts Amherst |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2172-123X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 119 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 10 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Organizational Scarring, Legal Consciousness, and the Diffusion of Local Government Litigation Against Opioid Manufacturers
Between 2017 and 2020, local government attorneys’ offices in the United States filed a surge of lawsuits against opioid manufacturers, distributors, and retailers. Aimed at recovering the costs of the opioid epidemic, this “affirmative litigation” was a novel action for most of them. Participation necessitated a tectonic shift in how they conceptualized their roles vis-à-vis the law. To understand how this occurred, we use a mixed-methods approa…
Access to justice at the intersection of civil and criminal law
How parole boards judge remorse
One in seven people in prison in the US is serving a life sentence, and most of these "lifers" will someday be eligible for discretionary parole. But little is known about a key aspect of parole decision-making: remorse assessments. Because remorse is a complex emotion that arises from past wrongdoing and unfolds over time, assessing the sincerity of another person's remorse is neither a simple task of lie detection, nor of determining emotional …
How Cultural Capital Shapes Mental Health Care Seeking in College
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 mor…
Racial Disparities in Lifer Parole Outcomes
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 e…
Understanding illegality
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss the tests the author faced in her sociolegal fieldwork on Hawaiian cockfighting, and to draw broader lessons from these tests for other ethnographers of illegal organizations. Design/methodology/approach The author draws on six weeks of in-depth ethnographic fieldwork and interviewing. Findings Relational work in ethnographic fieldwork requires skills academia does not always impart – including humi…
Legal Consciousness and Cultural Capital
In this article, we use a Bourdieusian framework to theorize the relationship between cultural capital and legal consciousness, and in turn to consider how variation in legal consciousness contributes to the creation and maintenance of legal hegemony. We investigate how cultural capital shapes the ways people navigate situations that force them to mediate between state-conferred rights, on one hand, and requests from state authority, on the other…
Legal Ruralism and California Parole Hearings
This article discusses the important relationship between rurality and criminal justice processes, drawing on field observations and in-depth interviews with parole commissioners to argue that California's physical carceral landscape profoundly shapes lifer parole hearings. First, commissioners report that prisons' location in rural areas affects the rehabilitative resources available, which are seen as an important aspect of their readiness for …
Masculine Compensation and Masculine Balance
This article poses a framework for considering the social processes that drive masculinity's enaction, including men's presentation of gender, masculinity's intersituational flexibility, and the persistence of gender inequality. I draw on ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews conducted in a small cockfighting community in Hawaii. On the surface, my findings are surprisingly counter-Geertzian: within Hawaiian cockfighting's uncontestedl…
Everyone Knows the Game
Past legal consciousness research has revealed a great deal about what individuals think and do with regard to law, but less attention has been paid to the social processes that underpin these attitudes, beliefs, and actions. This article focuses particularly on a "second-order" layer of legal consciousness: people's perceptions about how others understand the law. Ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with cockfighters in rural Hawai…
Legal Consciousness and Cultural Capital
In this article, we use a Bourdieusian framework to theorize the relationship between cultural capital and legal consciousness, and in turn to consider how variation in legal consciousness contributes to the creation and maintenance of legal hegemony. We investigate how cultural capital shapes the ways people navigate situations that force them to mediate between state-conferred rights, on one hand, and requests from state authority, on the other…
Everyone Knows the Game
Past legal consciousness research has revealed a great deal about what individuals think and do with regard to law, but less attention has been paid to the social processes that underpin these attitudes, beliefs, and actions. This article focuses particularly on a "second-order" layer of legal consciousness: people's perceptions about how others understand the law. Ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with cockfighters in rural Hawai…
How parole boards judge remorse
One in seven people in prison in the US is serving a life sentence, and most of these "lifers" will someday be eligible for discretionary parole. But little is known about a key aspect of parole decision-making: remorse assessments. Because remorse is a complex emotion that arises from past wrongdoing and unfolds over time, assessing the sincerity of another person's remorse is neither a simple task of lie detection, nor of determining emotional …
Racial Disparities in Lifer Parole Outcomes
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 e…
Masculine Compensation and Masculine Balance
This article poses a framework for considering the social processes that drive masculinity's enaction, including men's presentation of gender, masculinity's intersituational flexibility, and the persistence of gender inequality. I draw on ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews conducted in a small cockfighting community in Hawaii. On the surface, my findings are surprisingly counter-Geertzian: within Hawaiian cockfighting's uncontestedl…
How Cultural Capital Shapes Mental Health Care Seeking in College
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 mor…
Legal Ruralism and California Parole Hearings
This article discusses the important relationship between rurality and criminal justice processes, drawing on field observations and in-depth interviews with parole commissioners to argue that California's physical carceral landscape profoundly shapes lifer parole hearings. First, commissioners report that prisons' location in rural areas affects the rehabilitative resources available, which are seen as an important aspect of their readiness for …
Access to justice at the intersection of civil and criminal law
Everyone Knows the Game
Past legal consciousness research has revealed a great deal about what individuals think and do with regard to law, but less attention has been paid to the social processes that underpin these attitudes, beliefs, and actions. This article focuses particularly on a "second-order" layer of legal consciousness: people's perceptions about how others understand the law. Ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with cockfighters in rural Hawai…
Masculine Compensation and Masculine Balance
This article poses a framework for considering the social processes that drive masculinity's enaction, including men's presentation of gender, masculinity's intersituational flexibility, and the persistence of gender inequality. I draw on ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews conducted in a small cockfighting community in Hawaii. On the surface, my findings are surprisingly counter-Geertzian: within Hawaiian cockfighting's uncontestedl…
Understanding illegality
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss the tests the author faced in her sociolegal fieldwork on Hawaiian cockfighting, and to draw broader lessons from these tests for other ethnographers of illegal organizations. Design/methodology/approach The author draws on six weeks of in-depth ethnographic fieldwork and interviewing. Findings Relational work in ethnographic fieldwork requires skills academia does not always impart – including humi…
Legal Consciousness and Cultural Capital
In this article, we use a Bourdieusian framework to theorize the relationship between cultural capital and legal consciousness, and in turn to consider how variation in legal consciousness contributes to the creation and maintenance of legal hegemony. We investigate how cultural capital shapes the ways people navigate situations that force them to mediate between state-conferred rights, on one hand, and requests from state authority, on the other…
Legal Ruralism and California Parole Hearings
This article discusses the important relationship between rurality and criminal justice processes, drawing on field observations and in-depth interviews with parole commissioners to argue that California's physical carceral landscape profoundly shapes lifer parole hearings. First, commissioners report that prisons' location in rural areas affects the rehabilitative resources available, which are seen as an important aspect of their readiness for …
Racial Disparities in Lifer Parole Outcomes
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 e…
How parole boards judge remorse
One in seven people in prison in the US is serving a life sentence, and most of these "lifers" will someday be eligible for discretionary parole. But little is known about a key aspect of parole decision-making: remorse assessments. Because remorse is a complex emotion that arises from past wrongdoing and unfolds over time, assessing the sincerity of another person's remorse is neither a simple task of lie detection, nor of determining emotional …
How Cultural Capital Shapes Mental Health Care Seeking in College
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 mor…
Access to justice at the intersection of civil and criminal law
Organizational Scarring, Legal Consciousness, and the Diffusion of Local Government Litigation Against Opioid Manufacturers
Between 2017 and 2020, local government attorneys’ offices in the United States filed a surge of lawsuits against opioid manufacturers, distributors, and retailers. Aimed at recovering the costs of the opioid epidemic, this “affirmative litigation” was a novel action for most of them. Participation necessitated a tectonic shift in how they conceptualized their roles vis-à-vis the law. To understand how this occurred, we use a mixed-methods approa…
Political science (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Social Psychology (6 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (4 works) · Criminology (4 works) · Social Psychology (4 works) · Prison (3 works)