County attorney presents annual report to commissioners, gives county’s crime statistics

McLeod County Attorney Michael Junge kicked off his annual report for 2018 by telling commissioners and students attending the meeting for McLeod County Student Government Day, “I start out by mentioning that our job is drugs, sex, booze and gambling. That’s what we do in criminal prosecution.”
He continued, “And what we are trying to accomplish when we prosecute individuals for the wrongs that they have committed, is to seek rehabilitation so they don’t do it again; seek retribution, so they get punished; to seek restitution, so those who have been wronged are less wronged; and in the very worst cases, we want to lock them up and throw away the key. Thankfully we don’t have an awful lot of those.”
Junge then moved into expenses, where he mentioned it costs $35,000-$40,000 per year to keep somebody in state prison and over $100 per day to keep somebody in the county jail.
“So, our criminal justice system is expensive, it costs all of us an awful lot of money,” Junge said. He also said, unfortunately, that it would be optimistic to assume costs will go down and that the data doesn’t support a decrease in expenses.

(For the complete story, please see the April 17 print edition of The Chronicle.)