Most of the Romanians convicted for corruption in the past years are middle-aged men, married with children. Most of them don’t deny the facts or the acts they have been convicted for, but deny that they have done anything wrong, according to a study made by the Romanian Ministry of Justice and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The study is based on the answers provided by 315 convicted offenders of a total of about 1,200 who were serving jail sentences or probation sentences for corruption as of January 2014.

Over 80% of the respondents were male, and 70% of them were over 40 years-old. Three-quarters were married and had a university education, usually having one or two grown-up children.

The majority of the respondents were convicted for the first time, and the penalty ranged from 4 years to 10 years (for respondents in prison) and around 3-4 years (for those on suspended sentence). Usually, their conviction came many years after they had committed their offence.

“When asked about the reasons they had for engaging in the offences they were convicted for, most of the interviewees said they had done nothing wrong; hence, they could not provide a motivation for their deeds. This is the most common answer to this question and reflects the pattern of the interviews: while most of them admitted at the end of the interview that they had engaged in the behavior they were convicted for, they disagreed with labeling their actions as corrupt,” the study shows.

In the few cases where the respondents would saw their actions as acts of corruption, or when they were willing to offer a motivation for what they did, the answers ranged from “the whole system encourages corruption”, “there is bigger corruption at a higher level”, “corruption is a practice”, “everybody does that so I couldn’t be different” to “when the boss tells you to do something, you do”, or "otherwise I would have lost my job".

In terms of benefits people expected from engaging in corruption, the most important ones were the expectation of personal satisfaction and gratification, and the ability to provide a better life for the offenders’ families, and not financial gain, as some of them said they had a good financial situation.

“The analyses show that the factors that seem to underlie corruption may be rather comparable to the factors that underlie non-integrity more generally,” the study concludes.

The full study is available here.

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editor@romania-insider.com