Better chew an aspirin before you read this one:

There’s a report from Calibre Press, a leading police training organization, that says a Wisconsin couple kept their seven-year-old daughter locked up in a wire dog cage.

This so-called punishment had been going on for quite some time and the only reason authorities found out about it was the little girl’s brother made his way to the police station-barefooted-one icy night in November to get help.

An investigation revealed the little girl was locked up in the two-foot by two-foot wire cage from the time she got home from school until the next morning. Many times she was confined overnight without food or water.

None of the three other children in the family were locked up in the cage. Instead, the parents dealt with them using pipes and sticks as tools of punishment.

If you’re thinking what I’m thinking, you’re having thoughts such as, "Put ’em under the jail and throw away the key." Are you ready for the trial judge’s response?

Judge Steven Weinke said he did not believe the parents’ conduct was "deliberately cruel." He said the parents had "already been punished" by extensive media coverage plus the loss of their jobs and removal of their children from the home.

Under Wisconsin law, the parents could have been sentenced to 40 years in the Big House. The prosecutor asked for only 20. But the Judge Weinke, a softy at heart, sentenced the parents to a single year in the county jail plus 10 years’ probation.

Under the judge’s order, the parents may be released from the jail for up to 60 hours each week to go to work if they find jobs.

Doctors say it will take no less than 20 years of psychiatric therapy for the little girl to regain at least some degree of normal mental health, if at all.