Best-selling novelist John Grisham has suggested too many men are being labelled paedophiles and jailed for too long for viewing child pornography online.

Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, he argued that some may have just "probably had too much to drink".

Grisham stated: “We have prisons now filled with guys my age -  60-year-old white men in prison who’ve never harmed anybody, would never touch a child but they got online one night, started surfing around, probably had too much to drink and pushed the wrong buttons and went too far and got into child porn.

"It happened to a lawyer friend of mine, a good buddy from law school.

"They haven’t hurt anybody.”

Grisham concluded: "I have no sympathy for a real paedophile, please lock those people up. But so many of these guys do not deserve harsh prison sentences."

The 59 year old goes on to blast the American justice system and its high number of serving convicts.

Here is the interview from the Telegraph: