Publish or punished

Under Romanian law, prisoners can shave 30 days off their jail terms for every book of scientific value that they have published

…While in prison for graft offences, politicians and businessmen in particular are churning out papers in order to take advantage of the loophole

…According to the country’s prison administration, 415 scientific works written by prisoners were published between the start of 2013 and December 9, 2015. In 2012, there were just seven.

Source. My favorite bit (emphasis mine):

There are strong suggestions that many of the books are being written by ghostwriters, or at least heavily guided by outside research assistants, who then pass the text on to the prisoners who handwrite them – the manuscripts must be handwritten rather than typed and cannot use any tools such as Kindle direct publishing for assistance – and pay for a small print run of a few hundred copies.

Replace “text” with “Stata code” and this starts to sound like economics professors.

Hat tip to Paul Lagunes.

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