Today a team of UIC researchers, led by prof and former alderman Dick Simpson—the Larry Sabato of Chicago politics—released a report called “Chicago and Illinois, Leading the Pack in Corruption” On the Trib homepage, the headline is “Chicago area tops in public corruption: study.”Keep that in mind: Chicago area. It raises some interesting questions about what public corruption is, how it’s detected, and what “tops” means.
It makes the broad point that the “Chicago area logged the most public corruption convictions of any federal jurisdiction in the United States during the past 36 years,” and that “on a per-person basis, only the District of Columbia and Louisiana had more convictions than Illinois, according to the report” (and the DC number is inflated because of where some cases are tried).
Yeah, I know, dog bites man. The city has an incorporation-long history of public corruption, and it’s clearly a problem. But corruption takes different forms, and rural areas tend to slide under the radar because they’re outside of major media centers (which reduces not only attention, but the sort of investigative coverage that can lead to federal charges). So at the very least I wanted to compare Chicagoland to another area known, if not widely, as a hotbed of corruption: eastern Kentucky.
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