Former PI studies treatment of prisoners

History graduate student and private investigator? The two paths are not exactly synonymous -- few grad students can boast of being a private eye before starting their academic careers at Penn. But History graduate student Kirby Randolph has a record of employment that reads more like a detective novel than a college application. Randolph, 31 -- who graduated in 1991 from Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., with a degree in political science -- first became interested in detective work while doing research for her undergraduate thesis on women in prison. "It was through the contacts that I made researching for my undergrad thesis that I was able to get my job as a P.I. in California," the fourth-year graduate student said. "I got very interested in prisoners' rights." And when Randolph gets interested in something, she pursues it with a vengeance, according to her colleagues. "Kirby is very committed," said Herman Graham, an eighth-year graduate student in African-American History and friend of Randolph's. "She is serious about her studies but avid in her social interests as well." While working for a federal advocacy agency for prisoners on death row, Randolph said she "had no other life" outside her job. "I was working 85 hours per week. I was always at the office," Randolph explained. Though Randolph's work was time consuming, it brought her face to face with two of her principle interests: history and prisoners' rights. "I'd say about 90 percent of my time was spent on paperwork," Randolph said. "The other 10 percent was interviews" where she looked for evidence to exonerate death-row inmates and provided key insights into the social history of minority prison inmates. The interviews were the most interesting part of the job, Randolph said. She talked to family members of death-row prisoners, usually older African-Americans. "I would hear moving, personal dramas," Randolph said. "There was nothing funny about these stories." "They were multi-generational social histories," she added, noting that they usually followed fairly similar paths. "They would always begin in the rural South, then the farm would fail and the family would move to California. There would be happy parts [like] World War II and how they got jobs, but then there was unemployment, drug abuse and domestic violence," she said. These sad epics fascinated Randolph, both in their historical content and in the sharp contrast they presented to her own life. "One of the most profound ways in which my P.I. work affected me was it taught me that other people's lives are very different from mine," Randolph recalled. "I grew up privileged. These people experienced circumstances very different from my own." After Congress cut funding to the federal resource centers where she worked, Randolph decided that she wanted to try something new, so she moved to another advocacy group. But by this point, she realized she was at a crossroads in her life. "I was at a point where I had to get a [private investigator's] license and start working on my own or go back to school." Randolph, who said she wants to pursue a teaching career when she graduates in 2001, chose the latter. While Randolph started her Penn career studying legal history in 1995, she changed her focus after writing a paper on the role of race in medicine. "I had noticed when I worked with prisoners that there was a lack of mental health care," Randolph said. "I also was ready for a change." Randolph will begin writing her dissertation this year, entitled "The Colored Insane: African Americans and Mental Illness," about the the treatment of African-American mental patients in the 19th century. Randolph said she hopes to break new ground in both African-American and medical history. "Her work should be very interesting," noted Randolph's advisor, History Professor Mary Berry. "Very little work has been done on psychology and African Americans."