Read the full article from the Buffalo News, here.
The Great Moments histories are the creation of Buffalo-based artist Caitlin Cass, whose work also has appeared in The New Yorker, The Lily and The Nib. For this exhibition, Cass has added original art and, with handwritten sidebars, says, “I will analyze my own canon in all of its messy, brazen eagerness.”
In a press release, Cass explains that she created the Great Moments comics in an effort “to make a history that prioritized failure instead of victory … the anticlimactic fizzling out instead of the path to progress.”
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In describing the images, Henry Louis Taylor Jr. of UB’s Center for Urban Studies said, “These portrait are about hope; they show a dreamscape of social change. They are about the possibility of building a future city where well-being and wholeness reign.”
Read the full article from Challenger Community News, here.
Prisoners Are People Too is hosting a Regional Conference in collaboration with the Alliance of Families for Justice on Friday, May 3, from 5:30-8 p.m. and Saturday, May 4 from 8:30a.m.-3:30p.m. at Mt. Olive Baptist Church, 701 East Delavan Avenue . The conference, whose theme is “Changing Criminal Injustice,” will highlight the strategies that we can use to improve the lives of the incarcerated, the formerly incarcerated, and the victims.
Activist-scholar Dr. Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. will be the keynote speaker on Saturday, May 4. Dr. Taylor is the Founding Director of the Center for Urban Studies at the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning. His research, focusing on issues of race and class has made him an expert in assessing systemic factors, fueled by racism, that frequently lead to criminal convictions.
Read the full article from Investigative Post, here.
The laws are making criminals out of tens of thousands of residents and straining court systems; yet in the case of debt-related suspensions, several experts said they provide little to no public safety benefit.
“We are taking people who are already on the economic edge, we are criminalizing them and increasing the burdens and hardships on their lives,” said Henry Louis Taylor Jr., a professor who studies race and class issues at the University at Buffalo.
Each year, a torrent of people with suspended license charges wind up in Buffalo City Court, clogging up judges’ dockets and bogging down public defenders.
Read the full article from Buffalo News, here.
A 2017 housing opportunity strategy study commissioned by the city found that most East Side housing units are moderately to severely distressed and located in underdeveloped neighborhoods with low market demand.
HouHou should be punished for his racketeering, but more important, Buffalo’s prime blighters should be exposed. The real predatory profiteers are the rental property owners who make hyper-profits by charging high rents for poorly maintained and distressed rental housing units, and the land speculators who purchase properties and hold onto them without making any improvements until more profitable opportunities can be found.
The City of Buffalo is also complicit in the East Side neighborhood blight. The city poorly maintains sidewalks, streets and vacant lots in those neighborhoods. And, their shamefully weak rental registration process makes possible the existence of a prosperous low-income rental market that exploits the poor and those on the economic margin.
Henry Louis Taylor Jr., Ph.D., is director of the UB Center for Urban Studies.
