Elsa Y Chen

Elsa Y Chen serves as Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Political Science at Santa Clara University, leading academic initiatives in criminal justice policy research and contributing to institutional governance within the university's political science framework.

Her research centers on sentencing disparities, Three Strikes legislation, prisoner reentry systems, and criminal record expungement, with particular emphasis on racial/ethnic equity, gender dynamics, and policy implementation challenges within California's criminal legal system; she examines how structural policies create criminal underclasses and impact marginalized communities through both quantitative sentencing analyses and qualitative narrative studies.

Chen's recent publications (2024-2025) reveal evolving methodological approaches including innovative online recruitment techniques for justice-impacted participants and analysis of policy entrepreneurship in automatic expungement reforms, while her extensive 2020 work establishes foundational frameworks for recidivism measurement, reentry research methodologies, and comprehensive data collection beyond traditional recidivism metrics.