Summary: Famed legal novelist John Grisham has told a magazine that the United States imprisons too many people for child porn offenses.
In an attack on the judicial system in the United States, legal novelist John Grisham said that the United States is wrongly jailing too many people for looking at children porn, according to The Telegraph.
“We have prisons now filled with guys my age. Sixty-year-old white men in prison who’ve never harmed anybody, would never touch a child,” he said in an exclusive interview with The Telegraph.
“But they got online one night and started surfing around, probably had too much to drink or whatever, and pushed the wrong buttons, went too far and got into child porn.”
Grisham pulled from his own life experiences to make his point. He referenced a friend who was caught in a Canadian child porn sting operation 10 years ago.
“His drinking was out of control, and he went to a website. It was labelled ‘sixteen year old wannabee hookers or something like that’. And it said ’16-year-old girls’. So he went there. Downloaded some stuff – it was 16 year old girls who looked 30.”
“He shouldn’t ’a done it. It was stupid, but it wasn’t 10-year-old boys. He didn’t touch anything. And God, a week later there was a knock on the door: ‘FBI!’ and it was sting set up by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to catch people – sex offenders – and he went to prison for three years.”
“There’s so many of them now. There’s so many ‘sex offenders’ – that’s what they’re called – that they put them in the same prison. Like they’re a bunch of perverts, or something; thousands of ’em. We’ve gone nuts with this incarceration,” Grisham said.
Grisham, went asked about viewing child porn fueling the industry of abuse needed to create the visuals, he responded with the following:
“I have no sympathy for real paedophiles. God, please lock those people up. But so many of these guys do not deserve harsh prison sentences, and that’s what they’re getting.”
Right now there are more than 2.2 million people in jail in the United States, which equates to more than 750 per 100,000 of the population. This is the highest use of prison sentences in the world.
Sentences for people who posses, but do not produce, child porn have doubled in the United States since 2004. The sentences have jumped from 54 months in 2004 to 95 months in 2010, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s report from 2012.
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Image credit: ABC News