Marianne Williamson, the 2020 presidential candidate, has announced a plan to prevent crime in the United States that calls education and culture ‘strong medicine.’
“The United States ranks at the top in violent crime among all industrialized nations, and the biggest group of victims experiencing violence in America is children,” said Williamson, whose plan is based on a holistic response to crime that requires a deeper focus on its causes and crime prevention solutions.
The plan focuses on improving community outreach by funding and increasing the number of community outreach social workers, particularly in underserved neighborhoods, and empowering community outreach workers to help prevent crimes in their communities.
“In America, our approach to managing violence and crime has typically trended towards largely ineffective punitive approaches, ignoring the underlying causes of our problems,” said Williamson.
“The biggest group of victims experiencing violence in America is children,” said Williamson. “We have some of the highest levels of youth violence and crime in the developed world. Youth violence is a leading cause of injury and death for young Americans aged 15 to 24 years. At some point in their lifetime, 54.5 percent of children and adolescents (age 0 to 17) experience some form of physical assault. Moreover, nearly a third of women in the United States have reported domestic violence.”
“In addition to the horrible price of violence for the people who experience it, crime and violence cost the U.S. economy hundreds of billions of dollars each year,” said Williamson. “According to a study by the Institute for Economics and Peace, the annual cost of police, justice systems, corrections facilities, and lost productivity from violent crime, homicide, and robbery, is over $3,000 for each U.S. taxpayer, or $460 billion for the United States economy.”
“Yet violence and crime don’t happen in a vacuum. A holistic response to this issue requires a deeper focus on its causes, as well as crime prevention solutions,” said Williamson. “Many of the underlying causes have been left unattended for far too long and merely addressing symptoms is unlikely to fundamentally reverse the tragic trajectory of violence in America.”
The candidate’s plan also includes creating trauma-informed child and family-service systems, building relationships between police and at-risk youth, providing domestic violence prevention and support services, teaching life skills in schools, and increasing funding for mentoring programs.
The Williamson administration would also make every public school in America a palace of learning, culture, and the arts, and revert to free tuition at state colleges and public universities, as was true until the mid-1960s.
By addressing the underlying causes of crime and violence, Williamson hopes to make a significant impact on the safety and security of communities throughout the United States.
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