Politics & Power Quote by Carrie P. Meek

There is a quiet indictment buried in Meek's plainspoken phrasing: the real scandal is not that crime exists, but that Washington keeps responding to it like a contractor paid by the square foot. "Just about every year" turns policy into habit, a ritual of motion that substitutes repetition for progress. It implies inevitability and, more cuttingly, convenience: Congress can always pass a crime bill. It reads as action, photographs well, and dodges the harder work of prevention.

The money is the tell. By leading with "spending billions of dollars", Meek frames incarceration as an allocation choice, not a moral fate. "Build more prisons" is concrete, industrial, and political in the most transactional sense: infrastructure for punishment, not for people. The subtext is that this is a budgetary mirror of national priorities, and the reflection is bleak.

Then comes the metaphor that sharpens the critique: "band-aids on society's scars". A band-aid doesn't heal a scar; it hides it. Scars are what remain after damage has already been done, and Meek is pointing to the upstream injuries - poverty, failing schools, addiction, joblessness, segregation by neighborhood and opportunity - that crime bills conveniently ignore. Calling them "society's" scars also spreads responsibility outward, refusing the familiar move of isolating blame in "bad individuals."

Placed in the era of late-20th-century tough-on-crime politics, the line reads as a warning about bipartisan muscle memory: punishment as a stand-in for governance. Meek isn't romanticizing crime; she's accusing Congress of choosing the easiest kind of seriousness - the kind you can pour concrete for.