John Grisham: men who watch child porn are not all paedophiles

The London Telegraph ^ | October 15, 2014 | Peter Foster

[2ndDivisionVet]

As best-selling novelist John Grisham prepares to publish his new legal thriller, he argues America's prison system has run out of control.

America is wrongly jailing far too many people for viewing child pornography, the best-selling legal novelist John Grisham has told The Telegraph in a wide-ranging attack on the US judicial system and the country's sky-high prison rates.

Mr Grisham, 59, argued America's judges had "gone crazy" over the past 30 years, locking up far too many people, from white collar criminals like the businesswoman Martha Stewart, to black teenagers on minor drugs charges and - he added - those who had viewed child porn online.

"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 to promote his latest novel Gray Mountain which is published next week....

[WilliamofCarmichael]

BUREAU OF JUSTICE STATISTICS

IN 2013 THE STATE PRISON POPULATION ROSE FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 2009 [while the] Federal prison population declined for first time since 1980.

No tables that I could find but this document states

WASHINGTON – U.S. state and federal prisons held an estimated 1,574,700 inmates on December 31, 2013, an increase of 4,300 prisoners over yearend 2012 , the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced today. This was the first increase in the state prison population reported since 2009. While the state prison population increased by about 6,300 during 2013 , the federal prison population decreased by approximately 1,900 inmates. This was the first decline in the federal prison population since 1980.

So as I read the above (my replies) and this information, in 2013 city and county jails held 731,208; this document says that U.S. state and federal prisons held an estimated 1,574,700.

That's pretty close to the 2.2 million as stated in the posted article:

.... the country's sky-high prison rates . . . There are currently some 2.2m people in jail in the US – or more than 750 per 100,000 population – which makes the US by far the heaviest user of prison sentences in the world. By contrast, Britain imprisons just 154 per 100,000 population.

Reply #22 lists criminal offenses.