re: John Grisham issues public apology for child porn comments

"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 continued, "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 went on to explain what happened to an old classmate:

"His drinking was out of control, and he went to a website. It was labeled '16-year-old wannabe 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 continued, "He shouldn't have 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."

Grisham went on, "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."

The Daily Telegraph writes, "Asked about the argument that viewing child pornography fueled the industry of abuse needed to create the pictures, Mr. Grisham said that current sentencing policies failed to draw a distinction between real-world abusers and those who downloaded content, accidentally or otherwise."

Grisham responded, "I have no sympathy for real paedophiles,” he said, "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."