For Eric Cadora, Director of the Justice Mapping Center, the map is just the beginning of the process. In this episode of "Shades of Freedom," he walks us through his youth in Lebanon, and on to his work in the US (and elsewhere around the globe) helping communities to understand their justice-related data, and turn that information into new ways to transform the justice system and enhance community safety.
For Eric Cadora, Director of the Justice Mapping Center, the map is just the beginning of the process. In this episode of Shades of Freedom, he walks us through his youth in Lebanon, and on to his work in the US (and elsewhere around the globe) helping communities to understand their justice-related data, and turn that information into new ways to transform the justice system and enhance community safety.
Cadora speaks to the critical role he played in helping communities to understand, through his Million Dollar Blocks analysis, how whole neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and disadvantaged are further punished through the justice system. And by looking at data from other systems (such as housing, workforce, child welfare), how they are further harmed through “crisis management governance,” where high needs neighborhoods receive no prevention-oriented services, until the point that a crisis response is all that is left.
He also describes his work behind Justice Reinvestment Plans, where communities look to how they could better invest policing and incarceration costs as prevention and community support services; and tells about his new work in the US in partnership with Aspen, the Justice and Governance Partnership, which will support mid-sized and rural jurisdictions to combine all these ideas into actionable change in their communities.
LINKS
BIO
Eric Cadora has worked toward criminal justice reform for 30 years, serving as a justice strategist and information technology consultant to government (both domestically and internationally), research institutes, and social purpose advocacy groups in pursuit of data-driven solutions to criminal and social justice challenges. Over that time, project partners have included the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Ford Foundation, the Urban Institute, Columbia University, the ACLU, NAACP, Children’s Defense Fund, and dozens of state departments of corrections across the country, as well as GIZ, DFID, and other international donor agencies. Cadora is the founder of Justice Mapping, a data visualization and geographical information systems consultancy.
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. 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 launched the “Justice Reinvestment” initiative, which became a multi-million-dollar Federal grant program of the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance. Before that, Cadora directed research and policy at the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services in New York, where he originated the “Million-Dollar Blocks” critique of prison spending.
Cadora was co-recipient of the American Society of Criminology President’s Award in 2009. His most recent publication, 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.
As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, The Aspen Institute is nonpartisan and does not endorse, support, or oppose political candidates or parties. Further, the views and opinions of our guests and speakers do not necessarily reflect those of The Aspen Institute.
Visit us online at The Aspen Institute Criminal Justice Reform Initiative and follow us on Twitter @AspenCJRI.
June 1, 2021
Copyright 2021 Aspen Institute Criminal Justice Reform Initiative
Announcer (00:02):
Welcome to Shades of Freedom from the Aspen Institute's Criminal Justice Reform Initiative. This episode's guest is Eric Cadora of the Justice Mapping Center.
Eric Cadora (00:14):
It became clear to us as we mapped Medicaid recipients, TANF recipients, et cetera, it became evident to us that the same heavy-handed last resort emergency response was happening in other sectors in those same places. And that criminal justice heaviness was, in fact, just part of a larger complex of this big emergency response system that we've been using for years so that people living in those neighborhoods aren't experiencing emergency response as a last resort. Rarely, it's becoming the most common government experience they have. And when that's the case, it just becomes incredibly ineffective.
Dr. Douglas E. Wood (01:00):
Welcome to Shades of Freedom. I'm your host, Douglas Wood, director of the Aspen Criminal Justice Reform Initiative. Today's guest is Eric Cadora. Eric has worked for criminal justice reform for 30 years, serving as a justice strategist and information technology consultant to government, both domestically and internationally research institutes and social purpose advocacy groups in pursuit of data-driven solutions to criminal and social justice challenges. In 2006, Eric founded Justice Mapping, a data visualization and geographical information systems consultancy. From 2012 to the present, he has led the data visualization component of international justice audits in Malaysia, Bangladesh, and Somalia, and domestically in Cook County. Most recently, he serves as a senior consultant with the Aspen in Criminal Justice Reform Initiative's Justice Governance Partnership. Eric, welcome to Shades of Freedom, it's so great to have you with us.
Eric Cadora (02:04):
Oh, thank you so much, Doug. Glad to be here.
Dr. Douglas E. Wood (02:08):
So, Eric, can you tell us about your personal background and how it shaped your commitment to social justice and criminal justice transformation?
Eric Cadora (02:17):
My earliest awareness was because my family is Palestinian American, although it's been dual for three generations. I was growing up in the early '70s and there was a much more biased awareness and lots of media hype. And so, I kind of suffered a little bit of sort of outright bias but mainly by, in all honesty, other kids, right? I can remember being in my fifth grade classroom and somebody standing up and saying, "Traitor," to me as if I were somehow committing acts of aggression. Just being Palestinian American, I was much more politicized from day one, from early on to just understanding the difference between what I knew from being very, very well-informed to what I was watching on media, on television and how radically different that was.
Eric Cadora (03:38):
But it wasn't until I accidentally fell into a criminal justice work without intending to that I really started to see a much more meaningful way to be engaged. And in fact, found myself at a kind of a crisis of relevancy of what I was studying. I was at NYU studying sociology of violence and that kind of thing and learned so much from that. But at the same time, I needed work, so I got a part-time job with a friend of mine, a co-student at the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services in New York City, which at the time was really, maybe one of the very few and certainly the largest alternative to incarceration agency in the country. I learned so much there from every angle possible starting just as a part-time editor of court reports and finishing my tenure there 14 years later as director of policy and research and essentially advising in the direction of where the agency would go.
Eric Cadora (04:58):
And back then, it's hard to realize this now, but back then, this is the late '90s, mid, whatever, and no one was talking about justice reform. I mean, there were some stalwart organizations like The Sentencing Project, et cetera, but you couldn't talk about it in the halls of official government and get anything done because you were terribly pigeonholed between being soft or getting tough. And that's where the conversation began and end. I started with things I knew and that was things that had been developing in the criminal justice world like crime mapping, where the crimes happen, how do you tactically prevent them, the police were using it for hotspot, crime hotspots, that sort of thing. And that, of course, helped law enforcement talk about crime. But I also had been looking at other ways of using mapping and started to read about the way in which, for example, indigenous peoples were using GIS to stake and reclaim rights to territories.
Eric Cadora (06:16):
I've saw how low-income communities and community organizations were pressing against or were suing banks for redlining their neighborhoods with few small mortgages, small business loans or home mortgages, redlining essentially, and those who were working in court. And then, I saw how it was being used in the opposite way sort of as predatory lending. I saw organizations that targeted neighborhoods because of weak civil society, infrastructure, low income, and the need for sort of predatory lending. All of that really crystallized in me in terms of how effective mapping and cartography was. But I realized that that wasn't helping us yet. I was reading about the community, now this jumps the gun a little bit, but about the Community Reinvestment Act, and it just struck me that, what if we pivoted away from crime and mapping crime and pivoted towards mapping where people live, who go to jail and prison every year? Because while we all sort of knew the answer to that anecdotally, oddly enough, no one had ever empirically charted it, no one actually got the numbers together and mapped it.
Dr. Douglas E. Wood (07:49):
You are widely known within the criminal justice field and beyond for your work on the Million-Dollar Block concept. So, tell us about that in more depth and tell us how that frame changed how we think about investments in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty.
Eric Cadora (08:08):
Absolutely. I mean, for me, it changed everything. Because once I understood that and we started to map it, I got a bunch of data for Brooklyn and New York City at large and we mapped block by block, every single block in Brooklyn in terms of incarceration rates, how many people for how long, et cetera, and I presented it to our board and suggested that we need to pursue this kind of thinking in some form. We knew how many people went to prison from every block, how long they went for, and what it costs so we turned these prison admission maps into money maps and found 35 individual blocks in Brooklyn for which the state was spending more than $1 million every year to remove people and on average for about two to three years. So, that picture exploded in my head that said, "Wait a minute, what's going on here?"
Eric Cadora (09:06):
Like despite all intents, there are like five, or six, seven neighborhoods here that have a highly disproportionate people, number of people, going in and out of prison every two or three years at a cost of a million dollars a year. In other words, we were financing a migration project, a mass migration in and a mass migration back. And that just said everything, not only is it a waste or what's the trade off, et cetera, but we know how difficult it is to absorb immigration, immigrant populations and this, right? And so, all the ties that get broken and then have to be re-established and are broken again, through that mass population movement just struck me as this is all about these neighborhoods and communities, this is where the data should be pointing us to talk about.
Eric Cadora (09:59):
We met in Deschutes County, Oregon a guy named Dennis Maloney who really changed things for me because he had been doing sort of that kind of analysis without publicizing it in a kind of communications way. But rather, he was the juvenile justice director at the time for the county and he was also on the school board, and it turns out that he was learning that the state was planning its facility construction budget by looking at the demographics of counties and how many young people are going to be of age at what time and planning to build jails and prisons at the state for them, while at the same time, he'd go to the board, the school board, and they'd struggle to figure out how to patch a hole in the roof.
Dr. Douglas E. Wood (10:53):
Unbelievable.
Eric Cadora (10:53):
And he said, "This is nuts." He organized a bunch of county commissioners and local business people because Deschutes' a Republican town and they lobbied a state Senator in Oregon and they made a deal. And the deal was, from here on, Deschutes County is not going to send any more juveniles to state incarceration facilities. In exchange for that, the State of Oregon is going to send the Deschutes County a block grant in the amount of money that it would have cost them to incarcerate those guys with the proviso that, "You send them back to us, we'll charge you back for it." Which was just brilliant because it reversed all these financial disincentives to local innovation and to solving problems locally. Because if you just send the guys away, the state's paying the prison costs.
Dr. Douglas E. Wood (11:49):
Right.
Eric Cadora (11:50):
If you keep them and try to do something constructive and less harmful and more productive, that's going to cost you money.
Dr. Douglas E. Wood (11:58):
Well, let's talk a little bit more about justice reinvestment. When you and Susan Tucker really helped to develop this concept, your model uses data-driven management tools to determine how much money is being invested in the criminal justice system community by community, how to reduce excessive incarceration and then how to divert those savings back into social sectors such as healthcare, education, housing, and employment. Tell us a little bit more about, you've just gave us a great example in Oregon, tell us a little bit more about your vision of justice reinvestment.
Eric Cadora (12:35):
It was another in the line of great bosses, Susan Tucker who treated me just like a colleague and really took this Million Dollar Blocks idea and Dennis Maloney's idea and said, "Why don't we try this as a grant-making institution across the country for adults? Let's go help places reduce their prison populations, vouch safe the savings and reinvest them in high incarceration neighborhoods." And this was at a time when we were just suffering a recession as a result of 9/11, and we knew states had no money and everybody was broke, and in fact, the states were worried. This was also the time when crime had plummeted in the United States, right? So, the states were wondering, "Wait a minute. Why if crime is plummeting, am I paying more for my prisons?" The main driver of incarceration is incarceration policy, not crime rates.
Eric Cadora (13:40):
So, we organized a group of really smart experts, i.e. Grantees who came to us. First, we went to Connecticut, but from then on, we went to very conservative states, Kansas, Louisiana, Texas, et cetera to say, "Look, we can, with our expertise, we can show you how you can reduce, not just stop the growth, but reduce your prison population with no impact on crime whatsoever. And then, as long as you will vouch safe, the savings associated with that drop for reinvestment in the local high incarceration neighborhoods, we'll have a deal." And so, we did that across 20 some states over the course of about a number of years. There was a problem, and the problem was, while we were actually very effective at getting states just to loosen, to adopt the policies of prison reduction and loosen up the coffers, we were not very effective at helping the localities organize a coherent demand for those reinvestments.
Eric Cadora (14:51):
What happened is they got shunted to all sorts of different things, right, whether it was probation or more law enforcement are different. And sometimes, it was honestly a good attempt to say, "Look, we stopped revoking people to prison that reduced our population, let's invest in that kind of stuff." But rarely did they do what Dennis Maloney had done, which was when they got their grant, they put together a commission and organized RAND to come up and make presentations on what works at the neighborhood level, what were the most effective preventive programs. And they invested their criminal justice prison dollars in home nursing visitation programs, in pre-K education programs, and in neighborhood-based probation. So, they really were smart. And that was the vision we had, that Susan and I had when we first wrote this up, but we were not terribly successful at that second sight of it.
Dr. Douglas E. Wood (15:50):
So, when you hear the term over-policing, particularly when it comes to neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, what's the impact of over-policing in those neighborhoods and communities?
Eric Cadora (16:08):
Well, I've long believed that the burst in the use of heavy law enforcement and incarceration that started certainly in the '70s but accelerated in the '90s was really part of this weird concept of a zero-sum game. And that is that, well, we have neighborhoods that have weak civic, civil society institutions and poor mobility networks and that causes safety problems. So, we can make up for the lack of civil society infrastructure by pouring a bunch more criminal justice structure in there to keep things under control, right? And so, to me, that has a big impact and characterizes how and why, in great part, we over enforce and we overuse criminal justice in these particular neighborhoods. It betrays what makes places really safe because we always, of course, knew and discovered that there were multiple layers of disadvantage that overlapped in those same neighborhoods.
Eric Cadora (17:27):
But instead of just thinking of it as disadvantage, it became clearer to us as we mapped Medicaid recipients, TANF recipients, et cetera, it became evident to us that the same heavy-handed last resort emergency response was happening in other sectors in those same places. And that criminal justice heaviness was, in fact, just part of a larger complex of this big emergency response system that we've been using for years, so that people living in those neighborhoods aren't experiencing emergency response as a last resort. Rarely, it's becoming the most common government experience they have. And when that's the case, it just becomes incredibly ineffective, right? It doesn't work and it starts to cause harm. I think that's what people are realizing more and more today and what they realize a little bit from the defund the police movement has really brought that out in all honesty.
Dr. Douglas E. Wood (18:27):
You mentioned emergency management governance and what we at Aspen sometimes call crisis management governance, and you wrote a piece in The Washington Post most recently as a part of their re-imagining justice series, what do you mean by that? What do you mean about this notion of emergency management governance?
Eric Cadora (18:48):
Just plain speaking, it's this overlap of this kind of heavy footprint response by government programs that is disproportionately applied in particular neighborhoods that have historically suffered inequities of all sorts, presence that is all these different heavy-handed, last resort crisis responses and programs that eschew the real sources of safety and justice, which have to do of course with opportunity, possibility, stakes, et cetera in your local environment. So, emergency management governance is really important to understand that way.
Eric Cadora (19:41):
But I also think it's important because even in the justice reform field, there have been, in an attempt to overcome the craziness of the overuse of incarceration, there's also been in some ways resort to, well, if something works, let's go all out so that the movement about treatment rather than incarceration, which was hugely important and in fact gets at the root of a lot of incarceration, also tended to medicalize the issue so that, in some ways, one understood, well, it's not just that we're punishing foolishly, counterproductively shooting ourselves in the foot and driving neighborhoods into further immobility. It's that the medicalization of the issue minimizes the other roots of why we over-punish and why we're using emergency management government itself.
Dr. Douglas E. Wood (20:46):
Well, this is a great segue to the next question and that is, tell our listeners about our work together in the Justice Governance Partnership. What is it all about? What do you hope we can accomplish together in partnership with communities, specifically in these mid-sized cities and micropolitan and rural jurisdictions?
Eric Cadora (21:07):
The events of the day, both really the trigger of George Floyd's murder and the street demands that that led to everywhere in the country coupled with a national population that was now sheltered in place watching it all, right? We're also experiencing now for the first time their own health insecurity, economic insecurity, et cetera in a way that residents of these particular neighborhoods experience every day. But when the nation experienced it, all of a sudden, it's an emergency and a crisis, and I really believe that woke up people a little bit to what it means to live under those conditions and what that can do to you in the end. And I think it's opened up both because of the response to the Floyd murder and the broader exposure of the public to what it's like to live under these conditions, that there's a movement now that's tremendous, I haven't seen since the day I started doing this work 30 some years ago.
Eric Cadora (22:17):
So, I think that's led us to put this project together in a way that says, "Look, let's go with this momentum. This momentum is meaningful. We're not going to find solutions to place-based problems unless we start spanning across multiple sectors in a coordinated way. So, let's bring the police data together and show it with the court data, together with health data, together with hospitals' information, with employment data, let's survey people, understand at the neighborhood level what they think because legitimacy is a big problem in this country in terms of perception of the justice system.
Eric Cadora (23:03):
Today, I think we have just this remarkable opportunity, both because of historical tides and because of what we've learned to really start to consolidate. So, it's not really about this brand new single innovative idea, it's about knitting together all these capacities that we now have but which aren't knit together. And if we can do that, it will teach us new ways to govern and be infinitely more effective at achieving goals at the neighborhood level because it's going to be much more strategically informed.
Dr. Douglas E. Wood (23:41):
We always ask our guests this question at the end of podcast, what does the phrase Shades of Freedom mean to you now and into the future?
Eric Cadora (23:54):
Well, boy, that's almost a book question. But Shades of Freedom has to me that full of multiple meanings because of the way it expresses so many opportunities and problems that we face today. Because obviously, shades can refer, to me, it immediately refers to the differential access to freedom that exists today and imbues the sort of stratification of our society to an extent that is highly stratified. And I think shades really brings that meaning to the fore to me. Of course, it's also imbued with the specific inequities that have been visited upon people of color, whether it's Latin, African American, even Middle Eastern, et cetera, that it brings together that Shades of Freedom are disproportionally available to shades of people. And I think that really captures so much right there. Then, even thirdly, casting shade somehow comes to mind as well, that there's a bit of ominousness about the fact that we live under a kind of a cloud of inequities still that we know is there and we simply have to gather the storm to interrupt it and do something about it.
Dr. Douglas E. Wood (25:45):
Wow, Eric, thank you so much for being a guest on Shades of Freedom. It's such a pleasure to have you on and a real pleasure to work with you every day.
Eric Cadora (25:54):
Well, thank you, Doug. And I can't tell you how fun it's been listening to Shades of Freedom and then how honored I am to be able to be one part of it. Thank you.
Announcer (26:06):
Thanks for joining us for Shades of Freedom from the Aspen Institute's Criminal Justice Reform Initiative. We'll be back soon with more thought-provoking guests. So, please subscribe on your favorite podcast app. This podcast was produced by Lynnea Domienik with research assistance by Willem Patrick. It was edited by Ken Thompson. Special thanks to Christian Devers and Wanda Mann. CJRI's programs are made possible by support from Arnold Ventures, the Bank of America Charitable Foundation, the Arthur M. Blank Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Maya and Mike Crothers, the Ford Foundation, and Google.