"Kids who are sentenced by college-football-loving judges
who are disappointed after unexpected team losses are finding themselves
behind bars for longer than kids who are sentenced after wins or
predicted losses.
That’s the gist of a new working paper by a pair of economists at Louisiana State University. It sounds almost comical, like an Onion
headline, at first glance: 'Judge Sentences Teen to Two Years After
Louisiana Tigers Fall to Wisconsin Badgers.' But, insists Naci Mocan, an
economics professor at LSU and a co-author (with a fellow professor,
Ozkan Eren) of 'Emotional Judges and Unlucky Juveniles,' it’s not far
off.
In looking at decisions handed down by judges in Louisiana’s juvenile
courts between 1996 and 2012, the pair found that when LSU lost football
games it was expected to win, judges—specifically those who had earned
their bachelor’s degrees from the school—issued harsher sentences in the
week following the loss. When the team was ranked in the top 10 before
the losing game, kids wound up behind bars for about two months longer,
on average. When the team was not as highly ranked, it was a little more
than a month. The pair found that the harsher sentences
disproportionately affected black defendants."
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