John Grisham, the best-selling author of legal thrillers such as The Firm and The Client, has argued that not all men who watch "child porn" are paedophiles or should go to jail.
Grisham told the telegraph.co.uk that the US judicial system was out of control and that prisons were packed with people who should not be there in the first place.
In a wide-ranging interview to promote his latest book, Grisham said: "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.
"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.
"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,"
