Illinois and integrity: a strange tale and curious mix

Jeff Kelly Lowenstein
Updated

The political epitaph for recently defeated Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn aptly summarizes Illinois’ rich history of corruption.

He may have been ineffective, local wags said, but at least he hasn’t been indicted.

Not yet, anyway.

Executive innocence is not to be taken for granted in Illinois, a state where four of the past nine governors have gone to prison and Secretary of State Paul Powell stashed hundreds of thousands of dollars into a shoe box, briefcases and strongboxes that were discovered after his death in 1970.

And there’s more. Much more. For decades a steady stream of local, state and federal politicians have been tried and convicted in the Land of Lincoln. In fact, from 1976 to 2012, 1,913 public officials ended up behind bars after their trials in Illinois’ Northern District, the federal court for the state’s northern counties, according to an analysis by longtime political observers Dick Simpson and Tom Gradel, authors of Corrupt Illinois: Patronage, Cronyism and Criminality.

That’s the nation’s third-highest rate in the country after the District of Columbia and Louisiana, the pair found.

So how is it, then, that Illinois fared relatively well in the 2012 State Integrity Investigation, a comprehensive national ranking of state government transparency and accountability published by the Center for Public Integrity, Global Integrity and Public Radio International?

In 2012 Illinois received a seemingly mid-range grade of C, but that was the eleventh highest mark in the country. Louisiana came in fifteenth, with a C- grade. New Jersey, another state with a long corruption history, topped the list with a B+.

The explanation for these grades lies in both action and reaction. In Illinois, the corruption has traditionally stemmed from the intersection of the state’s fabled machine-based political culture, grounded in Chicago, with the sheer volume of governmental units. These circumstances have provided fertile ground for the kind of wacky scandals (just Google Rod Blagojevich) that have garnered national and even international attention. And the scandals, in turn, have prompted some reasonably aggressive and well-intentioned state-level reforms that yielded a comparatively high grade for Illinois’current anti-corruption regime.

There’s more to this story. Click here to read the rest at the Center for Public Integrity.

This story is part of State Integrity Investigation. Click here to read more stories in this investigation.

Related stories

Copyright 2014 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.