Andrea Cantora
associate professor
School of Criminal Justice
Additional Role:
director, Second Chance College Program
Contact Information:
Phone: 410.837.5352
E-mail: acantora@ubalt.edu
Ph.D., John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY Graduate Center
M.A., John Jay College of Criminal Justice
B.A., B.A., Seton Hall University
Andrea Cantora's C.V. (.pdf)
Cantora’s primary research interests are focused on issues related to incarceration, prison reentry, and urban crime prevention. Since 2002, Cantora has conducted research in prisons, jails and community correction settings in New Jersey, New York and Maryland. Cantora previously worked as a research associate at John Jay’s Research and Evaluation Center, and the Vera Institute of Justice’s Center on Sentencing and Corrections. Her work has been published in the Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, the Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice and Criminology, Criminal Justice Studies and American Journal of Criminal Justice.
Recent Projects:
- Cantora is currently the director of the University’s Second Chance College Program offered at Jessup Correctional Institution. This program is part of the national experiment under the U.S. Department of Education’s Second Chance Pell Grant Experimental Sites Initiative.
- Cantora is an advocate for expanding access to post-secondary education in prison and has recently published a chapter on "Second Chance Pell: Policy, Politics, and Programs" in the edited book Education for Liberation: The Politics of Promise and Reform Inside and Beyond America's Prisons. Eds. Robinson, G. and English, E. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
- Cantora has worked with the Baltimore City Mayor’s Office on Criminal Justice, and the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicator’s Alliance on a U.S. Justice Department, Bureau of Justice Assistance, Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation Grant. This project involves using data-driven strategies to reduce crime in the East Baltimore neighborhood of McElderry Park. Cantora has conducted focus groups and surveys in the neighborhood to understand how residents perceive local community issues.
Cantora, A., Iyer, S., & *Restivo, L. (2015) Understanding drivers of crime in East Baltimore: Resident perceptions of why crime persists. American Journal of Criminal Justice (Published online, November 25, 2015).
- Cantora is also a trained Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program instructor. Inside-Out is a national program developed at Temple University in 1997. The Inside-Out course, an elective taught in the School of Criminal Justice, brings UBalt students into prisons to learn side-by-side with incarcerated students.