Principal Investigators
Elsa Chen is a Professor and Chair of Political Science at Santa Clara University. Her work focuses on criminal justice reform, reentry from incarceration, criminal record expungement, the implementation and effects of mandatory minimum sentences, and racial and ethnic disparities in sentencing outcomes. She co-edited Beyond Recidivism: New Approaches to Research on Prisoner Reentry and Reintegration with Andrea Leverentz and Johnna Christian (NYU Press 2020). Dr. Chen’s work has appeared in journals including Justice Quarterly, Punishment & Society, Law & Policy, Feminist Criminology, Social Science Quarterly, the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, and the Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice. Dr. Chen is a member of the National Academies of Science, Education, and Medicine Committee on Law and Justice, and was a member of the National Academies Committee on Evaluating Success Among People Released from Prison that authored The Limits of Recidivism: Measuring Success After Prison (2022). Dr. Chen has served on the American Society of Criminology (ASC) Executive Board, the Racial Democracy, Crime and Justice Network steering committee, and the U.S. Dept. of Justice, Office of Justice Programs’ Science Advisory Board, and served as Executive Council member and co-chair of the ASC Division on People of Color and Crime (DPCC). She has received honors including the ASC DPCC’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and the David E. Logothetti Teaching Award and the Public Intellectual Award from SCU’s College of Arts & Sciences. She has also previously served as Vice Provost for Academic Affairs at Santa Clara University.
Sarah Lageson is a social scientist and lawyer who researches and writes about data privacy, the U.S. criminal legal system, surveillance, technology, and automation/AI. Dr. Lageson is currently an Associate Professor at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice and the School of Law at Northeastern University, as well as an Affiliated Scholar at the American Bar Foundation. Her 2020 book, Digital Punishment: Privacy, Stigma, and the Harms of Data-Driven Criminal Justice is the recipient of the Michael J. Hindelang award, which recognizes an outstanding contribution to research in criminology and has been featured in the New York Times, the Guardian, National Public Radio’s Planet Money, WNYC’s The Takeaway, and other media outlets. Dr. Lageson’s research has been published in Criminology, Social Forces, Law and Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, Punishment & Society, the Annual Review of Criminology, and the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, among other outlets. Her public writing about issues related to law and technology has appeared in the Washington Post, Wired, Slate, Vice, The Appeal, San Francisco Chronicle, and The Conversation. She received a PhD in Sociology from the University of Minnesota and a JD from Rutgers Law School, where she interned at the New York Office of the Appellate Defender and the New York Legal Assistance Group’s Pro Se Clinic at the Southern District of New York, and the Rutgers Expungement Law Project. Before academia, Dr. Lageson was an Americorps VISTA and worked in the nonprofit sector.
Ericka B. Adams is an Associate Professor in the Department of Justice Studies at San José State University. Her research focuses on criminal record clearance in the United States; gang violence, community policing, and resident safety in Trinidad and Tobago; and street outreach/conflict mediation programs. Dr. Adams’s research has been published in various journals including Prevention Science, Journal of Criminal Justice, Punishment & Society, Police Quarterly, Race and Justice, Journal of Crime and Justice, Feminist Criminology, and the Caribbean Journal of Criminology. Dr. Adams received her Bachelor of Arts in Criminal Justice from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, her Master of Arts in Criminal Justice from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and her Ph.D. in Criminology, Law, and Justice from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has served as the chair and co-chair of the American Society of Criminology’s (ASC) Division on People of Color and Crime (DPCC).