A Quote by George Will

Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes

George Will

Quote Topics

Drug Imprisoned More Property Than Today

Quote Author

George Will
American - Journalist
Born: May 4, 1941

Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes.

George Will

For the past seven years we have been cracking down on crime in Missouri, passing tougher laws for drug crimes and sex offenses and requiring prisoners to serve more time.

Mel Carnahan

Blunt force didn't knock out the drug epidemic. 21 million Americans are addicted to drugs or alcohol. And half of all federal inmates are in for drug crimes.

Michael Botticelli

Drug offenses ... may be regarded as the prototypes of non-victim crimes today. The private nature of the sale and use of these drugs has led the police to resort to methods of detection and surveillance that intrude upon our privacy, including illegal search, eavesdropping, and entrapment. Indeed, the successful prosecution of such cases often requires police infringement of the constitutional protections that safeguard the privacy of individuals.

John Kaplan

When poor and ordinary Americans who commit crimes are prosecuted and imprisoned, that is Justice. When the same thing is done to Washington elites, that is Ugly Retribution.

Glenn Greenwald

It would be a good time to replace the drug war with something more constructive. The cure offered the drug war today has probably been more harmful and done more damage than the disease.

George McGovern

Of course in this age of colorblindness, a time when we have supposedly moved "beyond race," we as a nation would feel very uncomfortable if only black people were sent to jail for drug offenses. We seem comfortable with 90 percent of the people arrested and convicted of drug offenses in some states being African American, but if the figure was 100 percent, the veil of colorblindness would be lost.

Michelle Alexander

Governments commit more crimes upon persons and property and contribute more to their insecurity than all [the] criminals put together.

Josiah Warren

If the price of the drug people want to use is through the roof, well then they're going to have to commit crimes to get the money to get the drug. You don't see any crimes committed over a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of beer, do you?

Jesse Ventura

Very few men imprisoned for economic crimes or even crimes of passion against the oppressor feel that they are really guilty.

George Jackson

The whole drug war is nothing but a pretext to increase police power and personnel, and that, of course, is dead wrong. So many created imagined drug offenses.

William S. Burroughs

After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening, on a lucky day, without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena.

Barbara Tuchman

It is not enough to show that drug A is better than drug B on the average. One is invited to ask, 'For which people ("& why") is drug A better than drug B, and vice versa? If drug A cures 40% and drug B cures 60%, perhaps the right choice of drug for each person would result in 100% cures.'

Lancelot Hogben

No other work has more often been blamed for more heinous crimes by the perpetrators of such crimes. The Bible has been named as the instigating or justifying factor for many individual and mass crimes, ranging from the religious wars, inquisitions, witch burnings, and pogroms of earlier eras to systematic child abuse and ritual murders today.

Nadine Strossen

Defenders of the system will counter by saying this drug war has been aimed at violent crime. But that is not the case. The overwhelming majority of people arrested in the drug war have been arrested for relatively minor, non-violent drug offenses.

Michelle Alexander

Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.