The Department of Sociology and the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice are hosting a talk by Dr. Bryan L. Sykes, Professor of Public Policy and Sociology at Cornell University, titled “Believing in Fairness: Economic Inequality, Shadow Costs, and Court-Ordered Rehabilitation Treatment Programs in the California Criminal Legal System,” on Wednesday, November 4, 2026, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in the Margaret Brent Room at the Stamp Student Union.
Abstract
Since the Great Recession, states have increasingly relied less on incarceration and more on diversionary and rehabilitation treatment programs. At the same time, research shows that other types of punishment, like monetary sanctions, have also been placed on the criminal justice reform agenda, highlighting how known financial punishments imposed by courts and probation services continue to burden and entangle poor people in the criminal legal system.
Yet, little empirical scholarship has examined how these two consequential areas of research and policy reform intersect in the lives of economically disadvantaged defendants, probationers, and parolees seeking to comply with their state-mandated rehabilitation programs.
In this paper, we examine how economic inequality and beliefs about criminal legal system fairness affect indigent people’s behavior through the routine attendance of their state-mandated rehabilitation health programs. Using pilot data from a novel and recent field experiment in Los Angeles County, this paper explores whether perceptions about one’s court case and whether the government should pay for rehabilitation services mediate the relationship between economic inequality (and its alleviation) and compliance with court-ordered programs.
Findings from this study will shed light on how beliefs and actions align within the criminal legal system—in the presence and absence of economic inequality among the poor—to highlight potential policy solutions and reforms for financial punishments and population health in the criminal legal system.
About the Speaker
Bryan L. Sykes is a Professor of Public Policy and Sociology at Cornell University and is the Science Core Director for the Cornell Population Center. He is a Senior Associate Editor for Science Advances, the open-access version of Science magazine.
Professor Sykes research focuses on demography and criminology, broadly defined, with particular interests in population processes (e.g., fertility, mortality, enumeration), mass incarceration, global population health, social inequality, law & society, and research methodology. His research applies and develops demographic, statistical, and mixed methodologies to understand changing patterns of inequality — nationally and abroad and has appeared in general and multidisciplinary science, social science, and medical journals.
Professor Sykes is a Research Affiliate at the Center for Demography and Ecology (CDE) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an External Affiliate at the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (CSDE) at the University of Washington. He is also a member of the Scholars Strategy Network (SSN) and the Racial Democracy, Crime and Justice Network (RDCJN) at the University of Maryland. He serves as an Associate Editor for Science Advances (the open-access version of Science), the former Academic Editor of Public Library of Science (PLoS) One, and former Co-Editor-in-Chief of Sociological Perspectives.
Professor Sykes received his Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography from the University of California-Berkeley and a Bachelor of Science in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
