Iowa county attorney lobbies for ‘Fight Crime: Invest in Kids’ – Radio Iowa

Carroll County Lawyer John Werden is urging congress to approve spending on youth applications designed to assist at-risk children and, hopefully, hold them out of the prison justice system once they’re adults.

Werden is on the manager board of a non-partisan group representing sheriffs, chiefs of police and prosecutors from all 50 states. “We work for laws in Washington that we imagine, long run, reduces or prevents crime,” Werden says.

The group “Combat Crime: Put money into Youngsters” was fashioned in 1996. Wergen and different leaders of the group have been just lately in Washington, D.C. to foyer for elevated funding of a federal program that gives house visits for brand spanking new dad and mom in high-risk areas.

“It’s a voluntary visiting program the place we get nurse stage professionals going into houses — primarily single mother or father houses — to emphasise good issues that you simply and I have been raised with, which is go to high school, examine onerous,” Werden says, “all issues that we all know will result in success later in life.”

Underneath present funding ranges, Werden says solely 3% of the households that qualify for this system are getting at house visits. The group can be asking congress to reauthorize one other program that gives federal funding for state amenities that home juveniles who’ve been arrested and charged with a criminal offense.

On the native stage, members of the group give attention to combating truancy. Werden says analysis clearly reveals retaining children at school is vital to combating crime.

“If I wish to know who’s going to be in jail, present me the youngsters within the 4th grade who can’t learn,” Werden says. “These are going to be our future prisoners, so retaining folks at school, retaining them concerned and engaged may be very, essential.”

In line with the Nationwide Evaluation of Grownup Literacy, 70% of the adults in U.S. prisons can’t learn at a 4th grade stage.

(Reporting by Nathan Konz, KCIM, Carroll)