Justice & Law Quote by Carrie P. Meek

It’s a rebuke disguised as pragmatism: if you only chase “symptoms,” you’re admitting you’re comfortable living inside the crisis as long as you can manage it. Carrie P. Meek’s line flips the usual crime-politics script, where toughness is measured in arrests, longer sentences, and the theater of “law and order.” By choosing clinical language (“symptoms,” “causes”), she reframes crime from moral spectacle to public condition - something produced, not merely punished. That move is strategic. It doesn’t excuse harm; it indicts the systems that reliably generate it.

The intent is policy-directed, not philosophical: shift attention (and budgets) upstream, toward poverty, failing schools, housing instability, addiction treatment, environmental neglect, and joblessness. The subtext is that symptom-management is politically convenient. You can count arrests, fund prisons, promise crackdowns, and claim results. Causes are messier, slower, and implicate voters, donors, and institutions. Meek is pointing at the incentive problem: punishment is legible; prevention demands patience and shared responsibility.

Context matters because Meek’s career rose through eras when crime became a proxy for race, urban anxiety, and partisan identity - from the late 20th-century “war on drugs” to the 1990s punitive consensus. Her wording quietly challenges that consensus without setting off the usual tripwires. “As well” is doing a lot of work: it’s an olive branch to people who fear that addressing root causes means going soft. The rhetorical power is in the pivot: keep safety, but broaden the moral and political frame of what safety requires.