About

Bryan L. Sykes is an Associate Professor in the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy and Department of Sociology at Cornell University. He is classically trained as both a demographer and a sociologist and applies and develops demographic, statistical, and mixed methodologies to understand how institutions, social policies, and population processes structure socioeconomic disadvantage. Over the last two decades, he has conducted empirical research and fostered educational opportunities that span multiple social science disciplines, emphasizing interdisciplinary training and research innovation to solve pressing social problems. Dr. Sykes serves as the Science Core Director for the Cornell Population Center and holds affiliations with several research centers including the Cornell Center for Social Science, the Berkeley Population Center at the University of California-Berkeley, and the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington. He is also a member of the Scholars Strategy Network and the Racial Democracy, Crime and Justice Network at the University of Maryland. His editorial roles include Senior Associate Editor for Science Advances and former Academic Editor of PLoS One as well as former Co-Editor-in-Chief of Sociological Perspectives. He holds leadership positions such as Treasurer-Elect of the Law & Society Association, Chair-Elect of the Crime, Law & Deviance Section of the American Sociological Association, and Chair of the Scientific Integrity Committee for the American Society of Criminology. His research focuses broadly on demography and criminology, with particular interests in fertility, mortality, population health, mass imprisonment, social inequality, and research methodology. Dr. Sykes is committed to education that builds scholars capable of addressing social problems by teaching students to critically evaluate and reform policies and programs to reduce structural inequities, racial disparities, and economic inequalities. His published work supports a knowledge-based approach to understanding race and class inequality in America and abroad.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Medicine
• Environmental health
• Geography
• Demography
• Sociology
• Law
• Economics
• Law and economics
• Finance
• Criminology
• Psychology
• Nursing
• Social psychology
• Monetary economics
• Intensive care medicine
• Public economics
• Surgery

Selected publications

• Death and disappearance: Measuring racial disparities in mortality and life expectancy among people in state prisons, United States 2000–2014

  PLoS ONE · 2025-02-06 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  BACKGROUND: Research on carceral institutions and mortality finds that people in prisons and jails have a high risk of death immediately following release from custody and that while incarcerated, racial disparities in prisoner mortality counter observed death patterns among similarly situated non-incarcerated, demographic groups. Yet, many of these studies rely on data prior to the millennium, during the COVID-19 pandemic, or are relegated to a small number or select group of states. In this paper, we explore changes in mortality and life-expectancy among different demographic groups, before and after the Great Recession, across forty-four states that reported deaths in custody to the federal government between 2000 and 2014. METHODS: Drawing on a novel dataset created and curated, we calculate standard, age- specific quantities (death rates and life-expectancy) using period lifetable methods, disaggregated by race and sex, across three different periods (2000-2004, 2005-2009, and 2010-2014) for each state. Ordinary least squares regression models with state and year fixed-effects are included to examine state-level factors that may explain differences in prisoner mortality rates between 2000 and 2014. We also benchmark death counts reported to federal agencies with official state reports to cross-validate general mortality patterns. RESULTS: Among imprisoned men, age-specific trends in mortality have shifted across the three periods. Following the Great Recession and the push for criminal justice reforms, prisoner mortality dropped significantly and is concentrated at older ages among men during 2010-2014; the shifting pattern of mortality means that men age 30 in 2010-2014 had similar death rates as men in their early 20s during 2000-2004, representing a 7.5 year shift in age-specific mortality rates. Gains in the mortality decline were disproportionately experienced by Non-Hispanic White and Non-Hispanic Black men, with the latter experiencing the greatest gains in life-expectancy of any demographic group. State-level violent crime rates are strongly and positively associated with prison mortality rates across states, net of socioeconomic and political factors. The large and significant disappearance of deaths in prisons from official data reported to federal agencies calls into question the narrowing gap in racial disparities among people in carceral facilities. CONCLUSIONS: Legal decisions and social policies aimed at reducing mortality may be most effective in the short-run; however, the effects of these policy changes may fadeout over time. Research should clearly discern whether changes in mortality rates across states are due to diminished gains in social policies or increases in the disappearance (or underreporting) of deaths in custody. Understanding how and why gains in survivorship may stall is important for aligning health initiatives with social policy to facilitate maximal and consistent mortality declines for all demographic groups.

  PublisherDOI

• Death and disappearance: Measuring racial disparities in mortality and life expectancy among people in state prisons, United States 2000–2014

  CrimRxiv · 2025-02-09 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  BackgroundResearch on carceral institutions and mortality finds that people in prisons and jails have a high risk of death immediately following release from custody and that while incarcerated, racial disparities in prisoner mortality counter observed death patterns among similarly situated non-incarcerated, demographic groups.Yet, many of these studies rely on data prior to the millennium, during the COVID-19 pandemic, or are relegated to a small number or select group of states.In this paper, we explore changes in mortality and life-expectancy among different demographic groups, before and after the Great Recession, across forty-four states that reported deaths in custody to the federal government between 2000 and 2014.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Access to jeopardy: The legal hybridity of criminal-civil debt in the United States

  Punishment & Society · 2024-05-24 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Research on the shadow carceral state identifies new species of criminal-civil and civil-criminal legal hybrids embedded in state law. We bring into conversation disparate literatures on growing family complexity, monetary sanctions, justiciable problems, and child support enforcement to examine how contemporary American families experience a system of double and triple jeopardy—the compounding risks of exposure to both criminal and civil debts at the nexus of a legal hybrid, wherein monetary sanctions (criminal) and child support orders (civil) become co-constitutive (double jeopardy), thereby amplifying the risk that a parent will also experience (civil) child support arrearage (triple jeopardy). Using data from seven sources to construct a unique dataset, we evaluate the spatial and racial risk of double and triple jeopardy, as well as the state-level factors that explain them. Our analysis provides a valid description of, and critically establishes the sociolegal precarity wherein, currently incarcerated parents observe and experience their risks of double and triple jeopardy in the child support system via its orders, collections, and enforcement powers. We find that there are, indeed, racial and spatial disparities in the risk of double and triple jeopardy, and that specific state-level factors increment and decrement those risks.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Mass Incarceration

  2023-09-13

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Beginning in the early 1970s – and continuing unabated until 2008 – the United States experienced tremendous growth in incarceration for almost four decades. Today, nearly 5% of the world’s population lives in the United States, but 25% of all prisoners globally are behind bars in America. The extraordinary rise in punishment has been accompanied by massive inequalities, with young, Black high school dropouts having borne the brunt of carceral growth. In this chapter, we discuss key federal and state policies that have been recently enacted in order to decarcerate American prisons and jails. In doing so, we pay particular attention to the role of inequality in shaping carceral growth and the ways in which these new policies attempt to mitigate racial disparities in incarceration while drawing down the size of the penal system.

  PublisherDOI

• Redressing Racial and Ethnic Wrongs in the Criminal Legal System

  Contexts · 2023-08-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Bryan L. Sykes and Meghan Ballard on racial justice acts.

  PublisherDOI

• Robbing Peter to Pay Paul: Public Assistance, Monetary Sanctions, and Financial Double-Dealing in America

  RSF The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences · 2022 · 23 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Economics

  Research on punishment and inequality finds that people with criminal records routinely avoid systems of surveillance. Yet scholarship on monetary sanctions shows that many people experiencing poverty with criminal legal system debt are also involved with the state in other domains of social life. How can these literatures be resolved? In this article, we posit that past research can be reconciled through a focus on financial double-dealing-disparate and contradictory economic entanglements that redistribute welfare resources from individuals to the criminal legal system and its institutional affiliates. Drawing on nationally representative survey data, as well as unique data collected on people with monetary sanctions in seven states, we find that individuals and families receiving cash and noncash public assistance are significantly more likely to owe monetary sanctions and are less likely to pay them. We discuss the implications of multiple-system involvement for ongoing surveillance.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Beyond the Penal Code: The Legal Capacity of Monetary Sanctions in the Corpus of California Law

  RSF The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences · 2022-01-01 · 12 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Knowledge about legal financial obligations in American punishment has been largely confined to criminal law and the penal codes of a few states. Yet in the nation’s most populous state, California, there is reason to believe that a wider expanse of law beyond the penal code harbors the legal capacity to impose monetary punishments and indebtedness. A legal census of the entire corpus of California’s civil and criminal statutory law identifies the presence and distribution of monetary sanctioning statutes within each and across all of the state’s twenty-nine legislative code sections. Results show that one in twenty-three statutes in California law concern monetary sanctions and that they are dispersed throughout every section of the legislative code. Our investigation reveals that monetary sanctions are embedded within the broader architecture of state law, and that variations in the structure, as much as the substance, of statutory schemes must figure into empirical and theoretical accounts of racial disparity in the imposition of monetary punishments.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• What Is Wrong with Monetary Sanctions? Directions for Policy, Practice, and Research

  RSF The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences · 2022 · 31 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Law and economics

  Monetary sanctions are an integral and increasingly debated feature of the American criminal legal system. Emerging research, including that featured in this volume, offers important insight into the law governing monetary sanctions, how they are levied, and how their imposition affects inequality. Monetary sanctions are assessed for a wide range of contacts with the criminal legal system ranging from felony convictions to alleged traffic violations with important variability in law and practice across states. These differences allow for the identification of features of law, policy, and practice that differentially shape access to justice and equality before the law. Common practices undermine individuals' rights and fuel inequality in the effects of unpaid monetary sanctions. These observations lead us to offer a number of specific recommendations to improve the administration of justice, mitigate some of the most harmful effects of monetary sanctions, and advance future research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Studying the System of Monetary Sanctions

  RSF The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences · 2022-01-01 · 32 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  some people are able to pay to be released from jail prior to adjudication (see Bail presents a somewhat unique case in that it is ostensibly refundable at the conclusion of a case. However, our research shows that at least a portion of sentenced fines and fees can be deducted from bail monies before refunding them, which makes bail a special prepaid form of monetary sanctions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Punishing Immigrants: The Consequences of Monetary Sanctions in the Crimmigration System

  RSF The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences · 2022-01-01 · 14 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Research on crimmigration—the intersection where criminal and immigration law meet—shows that immigrants are increasingly punished and deported as a consequence of a criminal conviction. We investigate how immigration status shapes the imposition of monetary sanctions. By drawing on interview and court observational data from four states, we demonstrate that the legal opaqueness at the intersection of the crimmigration system often results in <i>crimmigration sanctions</i>—enhanced financial and nonfinancial penalties that are the result of an undocumented immigrant’s liminal legality. Findings show that immigrants are financially exploited through gaps in criminal and immigration law that allow for crimmigration sanctions in the form of bail predation and the exchange of higher financial penalties for reduced or no jail time, lessening an undocumented immigrant’s risk of deportation. The implications of these practices for due process are discussed in detail.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Rakhi Dandona

  University of Washington

  146 shared

• Lalit Dandona

  144 shared

• Theo Vos

  143 shared

• Christopher J L Murray

  University of Washington

  137 shared

• Maziar Moradi‐Lakeh

  137 shared

• Guoqing Hu

  130 shared

• Chuanhua Yu

  126 shared

• Dan J. Stein

  South African Medical Research Council

  116 shared

Education

• Joint Ph.D. in Sociology & Demography, Demography & Sociology

  University of California Berkeley

  2007