YOU know something’s gone badly wrong when you yearn for a Hollywood actor to replace the Secretary of State for Justice.

But these feelings gripped me after I spotted an interview featuring actor Michael K Williams and juxtaposed his lucid comments on criminality with the froth spewed by neoliberal zealot Chris Grayling.

Williams shot to fame playing Omar Little, the gay “hood Robin Hood” who starred in HBO’s drama The Wire, screened from 2002.

The first major plus that Williams has on Grayling is that he actually knows a thing or two about what it’s like to grow up in poverty.

The youngest of 10 children and raised in Brooklyn’s Flatbush Gardens housing projects, Williams had a few brushes with the law prior to sofa-surfing while trying to make his way as a dancer.

According to figures from the Prison Reform Trust, in 2012 fewer than 1 per cent of all children in England were in care, but those children made up 30 per cent of boys and 44 per cent of girls in custody.

Poverty, deprivation and criminality are intrinsically linked, so one would assume that having a sound understanding of this would be a boon when pausing to pen enlightened penal policy.

Williams also knows a thing or two about the reality of criminality. Following finishing The Wire he ended up with a cocaine addiction that took him years to overcome.

He has now successfully beaten his demons and is starring in The Gambler, a film released on January 23.

To promote the film he was interviewed sporting a black T-shirt that reads: “I can’t breathe.” Those were the final words of Eric Garner, who died last July after a police officer held him in a choke hold on Staten Island.

Again, empathy must be viewed as a virtue in any decent Lord Chancellor.

Williams inadvertently made his pitch for the role of justice secretary — in my mind at least — when he said: “No-one wakes up and says, ‘I’m going to become a drug dealer’ or ‘I’m going to become a stick-up kid’. No. There is a series of events that makes them feel this is the only way out. As a black man growing up in the hood, I bear witness to some of those events.”

A firm grasp of reality, of cause and effect — undoubtably top attributes for a Minister of Justice.

To cap it all, Williams also recently became the celebrity ambassador for the American Civil Liberties Union, an organisation committed to addressing mass incarceration in the US.

The US is “the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we’ve put in American prisons and the percentage of Americans we put into prisons,” according to David Simons, writer and director of The Wire.

So Williams exhibits a belief that mass incarceration — predominately in private prisons — is a counter-productive approach that leads to chronic social dislocation.

As Peter Kropotkin, a Russian anarchist who had the misfortune to be holed up in several prisons across Russia and western Europe, stated: “Prisons are universities of crime, maintained by the state.” Only now a good number are maintained by private firms — a step further in the wrong direction.

By contrast, in office Chris Grayling has attempted to ban people from sending books to their loved ones in prison, slashed legal aid and privatised probation so that now low- and medium-risk offenders are being supervised by companies aiming to seek a profit — as already reported by Tania Bassett in these pages (M Star September 9).

He has also attacked the penal reform charity the Howard Reform League for “articulating a left-wing vision that is neither affordable nor deliverable,” after himself coming under fire for his brand of unjust justice.

Michael K Williams or Chris Grayling as Justice Secretary? It’s an open-and-shut case.