Locked-up Literati — Romania’s Jailbirds and Their Prison Plagiarism
When we talk of prisons, we talk about more than institutions and the people they keep locked up. There is a certain power structure behind the act of imprisonment, an intermingling of inequality, laws and state-centric discipline that tells us quite a bit about the country and its criminals. It is perhaps unsurprising that a growing part of Romania’s criminals are businessmen and politicians convicted on corruption charges. Romanian politicians and businessmen seem to have a penchant for the types of deals and schemes that, sooner or later, land them behind bars. The justice system being what it is, sluggish and prone to outside influence, some manage to avoid seeing the inside of a jail cell for a very long time. But for those unlucky enough to end up in prison after endless years of prosecution there are ways of mitigating the “damage” done by the justice system.
It’s true that Romania’s penitentiary conditions are quite adverse. Although violence is quite rare, the conditions are subpar and most prisons are overcrowded. The European Court of Human Rights has given Romania a six month term to “fix” the issue of overcrowding or otherwise risk being fined on a daily basis. And with the time quickly running out, Romanian policymakers resorted to some…creative legislation. While the saga of Emergency Ordinance 13, which sought to decriminalize certain forms of corruption in a bid to free up space in the prison system, is internationally known, another bold idea making rounds in Parliament would see sentences reduced by 6 days for every month spent in improper detention conditions.
But for the restless convict with fidgety feet there are other ways to reduce time spent in prison for corruption charges.
One tried and tested way is informing on your peers. Several politicians, including Gheorghe “Pinalti” Ștefan, had their sentences reduced for cooperating with authorities. Another would be to claim old age and previous medical conditions. Many of Romania’s politicians and businessmen who end up incarcerated spend less than half their sentence in prison because of this so-called “compassionate clause”. While some are indeed elderly, many of those who aren’t suddenly develop diabetes, heart conditions or other illnesses that call for better imprisonment conditions and, of course, an early release. Others (like Marius Locic) work or attend religious services, prompting authorities to declare them “reformed” and grant them an early release on grounds of good behaviour. But perhaps the most famous reduced sentence clause in Romania is that awarded for “intellectual labour”.
One of the nicknames for prison in Romania is ‘college’, as in, “Adrian Năstase went to ‘college’ for several years for corruption.” While this is more of a slang term used by common criminals it seems incredibly befitting for the amount of intellectual labour that goes on behind prison walls, especially among white collar criminals. According to Romanian law, for every scientific publication produced by an inmate, he or she is eligible for a sentence reduction. In the hey day of prison academia, the ‘discount’ was 30 days per work written. The term scientific is, of course, hard to pin down as inmates have seen sentence reductions for works such as “Chinchilla Raising”, “The Talk Show” or even memoirs, like Miron Mitrea’s “Subjective… memories. Moments of immediate history.”
Some jailhouse writers had prior academic careers. Adrian Năstase, whom we have previously touched upon, was actually a respected academic who had written quite a few books before incarceration. While in prison he produced a book on “The Two Romanias,” one of the recurring themes in his political speeches, a book that saw print and was widely available in bookstores. Other “scientific” works were less popular. The entire print run of George Copos’ book on Marriage alliances in the medieval Romanian principalities was bought by the author — possibly because it was massive plagiarized, as a damning academic expertise later showed. His four other books, on a subject closer to Copos’ expertise — tourism — were, however briefly, available for purchase.
Much like Copos, in terms of book subjects most corrupt politicians and businessmen found their niche, sometimes relating to their expertise or true calling. Ioan Niculae, a phosphate agro-baron wrote an entire treatise on Bioethanol entitled “The fuel of the future” alongside several other books on the modern day alchemy of turning biomass into gold. The many football impresarios involved in the “Football Transfers” scandal wrote libraries worth of football-related books ranging from transfer primers to “The basics of football education for high-schoolers”. Truly, the science of football has never been more advanced than in Romanian prison academia.
George Becali blended his four main interests in life — Religion, Politics, Football and Becali (not necessarily in that order) in the five books he put out while in prison, three of which have his own name in the title. Dan Voiculescu, however, is the absolute champion in terms of sheer volume, even though some of his works are obviously plagiarized. “The Professor”, as Voiculescu is known among his peers, wrote a staggering ten books on subjects ranging from the fate of humanity (“Whereto, humanity?”) to foreign investment in Romania. One might also almost find endearing the exploits of corrupt politicians like Dan Pasat or Cătălin Voicu who put out titles such as “Respecting the human rights of the accused during a criminal trial” or “Corruption as a phenomenon and the rendering of justice” — if they had not stolen, directly or indirectly, millions from the Romanian state.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with seeking expiation through “scientific” work, but the volume of academic work done by some prison politicians is literally unbelievable. Especially considering that many of the works jailbird writers claim to have written are either wholesale or “subtle” plagiarism, written overnight or they directly cite sources the prisoner would have no access to. And with over 400 books written by some 200 individuals in the past five years it was only a matter of time before the authorities took notice. The law has been changed, and now prisoners only receive a 20-day reduction, regardless of the number of scientific works produced.
The whole affair is so suspicious in fact that Romania’s National Anticorruption Directorate is actively investigating several academics, publishers and penitentiary parole board employees for aiding these prolific writers to plagiarise, ghost-write and cheat their way into lighter sentences. The authors themselves will most likely serve as witnesses against their former thesis advisors and facilitators, thus perpetuating the grand tradition of Romanian white collar crime: selling each other down the river.
