Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/university-of-chicago/)
When Abrea Ponce, 25, looks back on her childhood, she realizes things could have been different.
The San Diego mother and staff member at the San Diego Regional Task Force on the Homeless spent her critical teen years moving from couch to couch, hotel to hotel to avoid sleeping on the street. The events that led her to become homeless began long before she was a teenager, she believes.
Nearly one in 30 teens and one in 10 young adults experienced homelessness in the past year, a groundbreaking new study has found.
Ambitious and certain to draw criticism, President Barack Obama’s plan to rid the nation of the most powerful weapons on the market and attempt to arrest mass and everyday shootings was expected by Congress Wednesday, marking a sharp turn in a decades-long fight to curb America’s gun violence. As the debate was playing out in Washington, several local and national leaders gathered at the University of Chicago Tuesday evening to discuss guns and policy, with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, whose city holds the dubious “murder capital” title, among the group and pushing sweeping gun control legislation that cracks down on assault weapons. Also on the panel was Democratic political consultant David Axelrod, who this week said that the National Rifle Association’s recent assertion that Congress would not enact the sort of change that Obama and others were pressing, was off base. In fact, he said, real legislation will squeeze through the legislative process and signal real change in the nation’s laws and gun dialogue. Also in attendance was the head of the University of Chicago CrimeLab, who noted that while the United States has managed to improve its count of more common crime – property theft, etc.