ARI MELBER, MSNBC: Senator Paul, in your view, is the enforcement of the war on drugs racist?



SEN. RAND PAUL: Well, I think it has a racial outcome is a better way to put it. I think it's inadvertent. So, I don't think everybody is plotting to make it that way, but you can't escape the facts that 3 out of 4 people in prison are black or brown or have drug problems. And frankly, I think it has to do with several things. It's easier to arrest people who live in poverty. It's easier to arrest people who live close together. It's easier to arrest people where there are more patrols going on. We also give government grants to the police force based on arrest and conviction records.



MELBER: So you think it's accidently racist?



PAUL: Well, yeah, I think it has a racial outcome. That's one reason. We should fix it whether it did or didn't have a racial outcome. But because it has a racial outcome, I think there's even stronger motivation that, you know, if I told you ten people were being put to death that were black for every one, you'd be concerned would there be a racial element to that.



I think it should give us more drive to fix the problem, but the problem really of the war on drugs is taking a lot of people who make youthful mistakes, it's punishing them for our lifetime, and I think if we can get them back in to both voting as well as working, they're much less likely to get in trouble.



MELBER: Yet, Senator Booker, how we define the problem affects the approach we take. Is it a segregation problem, is it race-based or is it accidental? Do you think it's accidently racist or explicitly so?



BOOKER: I think you're complicating this far more than it needs to be. Rand said it very simply. This has a profound racially disparate impact, and we need to solve it using means by which we just take a dumb, broken system, frankly, and make it work for every American. It does not benefit Americans to spend a quarter of a trillion dollars locking up non-violent drug offenders and others in the way that we do. And so when you start looking at how you said perfectly this hurts poor people, hurts minorities more, and creates savage realities.



We have more African-Americans -- and remember blacks and whites have no difference in drug usage rates, but significant differences in drug arrest rates. Almost four times more likely to be arrested if you're African-American. And that's why now we have a system -- think about this right now. We have more African-Americans in this country now under criminal supervision than all the slaves in 1850. So this system is broken. You don't need to be black or white. You don't need call it racially intent, racial impact. You just have to do something about it.