From 2015 to 2016, Cadora served as the Chief Research & Data Strategies Officer for the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, where he oversaw the reorganization of the Office’s wide ranging research initiatives with the NYPD, DAs offices, Legal Aid, the courts, and Department of Corrections; and provided guidance to the Mayor’s citywide data integration initiative.

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Since 2012, Cadora has worked in close partnership with the international justice reform organization, the Governance & Justice Group, to establish the Justice Audit (bangladesh.justiceaudit.org) in countries internationally and domestically in the U.S. The Audit brings together data across the full spectrum of the criminal justice system from crime and policing through court adjudication to sentencing and incarceration within a unified and fully visualized data site. The Justice Audit is designed as a tool to support coordinated policy reform across the disparate agencies of criminal justice.

 

In 2006 Cadora founded Justice Mapping, a data visualization and geographical information systems consultancy. In partnership with Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation's Spatial Information Design Lab, Justice Mapping launched the Justice Atlas of Sentencing and Corrections, an interactive mapping website (www.justiceatlas.org) anchored in data partnerships with 25 state departments of corrections, parole and probation; and designed to foster policy narratives about the geographic dimensions and costs of locally concentrated incarceration.

 

From 2001 through 2004, Cadora served as Grants Officer at the Open Society Foundations (OSF), supporting a portfolio of reform initiatives across the country against the overuse of imprisonment. While at OSF, Cadora conceived and with Susan Tucker, launched the Justice Reinvestment initiative, becoming a multi-million-dollar Federal grant program of the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance in 2010, now operating in dozens of states across the country.

 

From 1986 to 2000, Cadora was the Director of Research and Policy at the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Education Services (CASES), the nation’s largest and oldest alternative to incarceration agency. While at CASES, Cadora developed the Million Dollar Blocks, analysis of jail and prison populations and spending at the neighborhood level.

 

Cadora was co-recipient of the American Society of Criminology President’s Award in 2009. His contribution, "Civic Lessons: How Certain Schemes to End Mass Incarceration Can Fail," can be found in the January, 2014 edition of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science; and he is co-author with Dr. Todd Clear of Community Justice. His maps appear in venues ranging from the Museum of Modern Art to the recent National Academies publication, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences.