Alan Dershowitz Quotes

As a prosecutor, I've been in prisons. I've had the opportunity to see what they're like in America.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

Ask any experienced defense lawyer: the real risks are for an accused person who is innocent. A guilty defendant has many more options available.

I take it that the judgment is an essential point in every conviction, let the punishment be fixed or not.

Affirmative action is the most important modern anti-discrimination technique ever instituted in the United States. It is the one tool that has had a demonstrable effect on discrimination. No one who knows anything about the subject would say it hasn't worked. It has certainly done something, or else it wouldn't have provoked so much opposition.

A crime is a crime irrespective of the birth marks of the criminal.

It seems like Michael Vick is going to jail for dog fighting. Hopefully, they won't have guard dogs.

Crime, like virtue, has its degrees.

The United States does have the highest rate of incarceration in the world dwarfing the rates of even highly repressive regimes like Russia, China or Iran. This reflects a radical shift in criminal justice policy, a stunning development that virtually no one - not even the best criminologists - predicted forty years ago.

The idea we have of prison is a scary place that also houses crazy people. And, to me, it was like, none of these guys were scary. They may have done things that are violent or scary, but these are not people that I feel nervous being around, and it feels like to me that we're wasting these men's lives in prison.

A subject I'm particularly passionate about is the criminal justice system and almost all of the policies that impact people's lives are determined on a local level.

Was this all part of your plan as my lawyer? I don't recall explosive escapes being part of the legal training." "Well, I'm sure it wasn't part of Damon Taru's legal training.

Overcriminalization has become a national plague.

There are no uncriminal crimes.

Let's take energy, for instance. I understand that in some industries, the input cost of energy is a major factor in whether an industry is going to locate in the United States or go elsewhere. So, when, at Bain Capital, we started a new steel company called Steel Dynamics in Indiana, the cost of energy was a very important factor to the success of that enterprise.

It's important that the United States not forget the lessons of September the 11th, 2001. I assure you, I'm not going to forget them.

To me, being a gangster was better than being President of the United States.

I've got a lot of letters from prison. Lost was a big prison show. But it's really crazy when you get the letter that says, 'So, I'm getting out in three months, I've only been in for 17 years and I'd really like to meet you.'

The European Union and the United States of America are the big important economic areas for us, which is why I always have come up strongly in favor of concluding a trade agreement with the United States of America.

The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our nation’s capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison.

The criminalization of Black life was something specific to the United States in the post-Reconstruction period and there's something like it happening today with mass incarceration, directed largely against black males.

We've got to address the systemic racism in our criminal justice system.

I prefer to be in the grave in Colombia than in a jail cell in the United States.

With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.

The rights of the people who have done terrible things are hard to defend. You have to keep pointing out, the question is the process to determine whether they've done the terrible things.