rural youth and handguns: Boy with sound-muffling head phones holds and shoots a rifle at a range.

Study: As young as 12, some rural youth regularly carry handguns

About 25% of rural youth in a University of Washington analysis said they were as young as 12 when they began carrying handguns and 20% of the roughly 2,000 rural youth and young adults studied carried a handgun at least 40 times during the last 12 months that they self-reported that activity, according to research published this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Youth drog overdoses: Young man wearing sunglasses stands with older amn in parking lot next to blue mobile medical vehicle

Study: Drug use less common, more deadly among teens during pandemic 

Published today in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association),  Trends in Drug Overdose Deaths Among US Adolescents, January 2010 to June 2021, noted an alarming increase in deaths driven by the widespread presence of illicit fentanyl in the drug supply, particularly in fake prescription opioid and benzodiazepine pills sold illegally. Researchers calculated the results by comparing overdose deaths per 100,000 for teenagers with US death records data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Angola prison: The entrance to the Louisiana State Penitentiary has a guard house that controls entry into the compound with seop sign, three white buildings and brick sign —the sign says "Louisiana State Penitentiary" and "Burl Cain, Warden"

Q&A: From Louisiana prisoner to Louisiana State University graduate

Within months of his release from a lifetime imprisonment sentence in Louisiana's 18,000-acre prison in Angola, La., Andrew Hundley, then 34, enrolled in junior college and founded the Louisiana Parole Project, a nonprofit focused on advocacy and reentry for former juvenile lifers. Under a 2016 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Hundley, who’d been sentenced in 1997, when he was 15, was released after serving 19 years at Angola. Hundley had the chance to start over, finish college and start a family. But many of the men and women he works with through the Parole Project are older and entered the Louisiana prison system at a time when there were no educational opportunities, especially for lifers.