Politics & Power Quote by George Will

The shock in George Will's line is arithmetic turned into moral indictment: America, a country that once framed crime as harm done to others, now locks up more people for what they put in their bodies than for what they take from someone else's. Coming from a journalist famous for patrician restraint, the sentence lands like a raised eyebrow that doubles as an accusation.

Will’s specific intent is to puncture the default “tough on crime” reflex by reordering the reader’s sense of proportionality. Property crimes map neatly onto the classic social contract: you stole, you pay. Drug offenses are murkier, often nonviolent, and frequently tied to addiction, poverty, and policing patterns. By comparing the two, Will invites a simple, uncomfortable question: what exactly are we punishing - predation, or deviance?

The subtext is about state power and the incentives that inflate it. Drug laws have historically been a flexible tool: easier to charge, easier to plead, easier to stack. The line carries an implicit critique of a system that treats “public safety” as a brand, not a metric, and uses imprisonment as a substitute for public health infrastructure. It also hints at the racialized geography of enforcement: which communities get surveilled, stopped, searched, and sentenced.

Context matters. This is post-1970s drug war logic reaching its mature, bureaucratic form - mandatory minimums, prosecutorial leverage, and political careers built on the optics of severity. Will’s statistic functions as a cultural mirror: the nation’s fear has been redirected from loss of property to loss of control.