Nope, they're just harder on white-collar crime.

They found that of 365,000 sentences meted out between 1992 and 2001, the GOP appointees appeared to give about 10 percent more prison time for violent crimes, drug offenses and theft.

"The political orientation of the judge matters with respect to street crimes," the two wrote. "Sentence lengths for street crimes are between 7 and 9 months lower for Democrat-appointed judges."

Democrat-appointed judges tend to assign white-collar criminals higher "offense levels" -- scores that reflect the seriousness of the crime -- though the scholars said they could not detect any difference in prison terms because of statistical issues.

The "statistical issues" comment makes me a little sad because that means there just isn't that much white collar crime being prosecuted in the country. I guess that means we need more Democratic prosecutors.

I wonder how much time the Enron boys are going to get for their fiasco. Probably not as much time as a third-striker caught with 20 dollars worth of crack, despite their crimes of widespread financial destruction.