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During Monday night's GOP debate, "drugs" was mentioned once, when liberal Fox News analyst Juan Williams noted that black people in South Carolina are jailed at four times the rate of white people for nonviolent drug offenses. He then asked Paul what he'd do to stop this. Perhaps amazingly, Paul used his precious response time to agree with the premise of Williams' question before punting the answer.WILLIAMS: Congressman Paul. An analysis by the Prison Policy Initiative finds that blacks who are jailed at four times the rate of whites in South Carolina are most often convicted on drug offenses. Do you see racial disparities in drug-related arrests and convictions as a problem? And if so, how would you fix it?
PAUL: Yes. Definitely. There is a disparity. It's not that it is my opinion, it is very clear. Blacks and minorities who are involved with drugs, are arrested disproportionately. They are tried and imprisoned disproportionately. They suffer the consequence of the death penalty disproportionately. Rich white people don't get the death penalty very often.
And most of these are victimless crimes. Sometimes, people can use drugs and [are] arrested three times and never committed a violent act, and they can go to prison for life. And yet we see times just recently we heard where actually murders get out of prison in shorter periods of time. So I think it's way -- way disproportionate.
I don't think we can do a whole lot about it. I think there's discrimination in the system, but you have to address the drug war. You know, the drug war is -- is very violent on our borders. We have the immigration problem, and I'm all for having, you know, tight immigration policies, but we can't ignore the border without looking at the drug war.
In the last five years, 47,500 people died in the drug war down there. This is a major thing going on. And it unfairly hits the minorities.
This is one thing I am quite sure that Martin Luther King would be in agreement with me on this. As a matter of fact, Martin Luther King he would be in agreement with me on the wars, as well, because he was a strong opponent to the Vietnam War.
So I -- I -- I would say, yes, the judicial system is probably one of the worst places where -- where prejudice and -- and discrimination still exists in this country.
