Posted on 09/04/2013 6:47:37 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
This weekend, the New York Times' Nick Madigan called Florida a "hothouse of corruption," reporting the Sunshine State saw the greatest number of people convicted of public corruption between 2000 and 2010.
That's technically true. But it's not the full story.
To get a true sense of the most corrupt state, we need to know how many convictions there have been on a population basis.
So we went back to Justice Department data cited by Madigan, to see which states saw the greatest number of convictions per 100,000 (Madigan actually appears to cite slightly outdated data; the latest covers the period between 2002 and 2011).
No. 1?
Louisiana, with nearly 9 convictions per 100,000 people.
The Dakotas are runners up.
The states with the fewest conviction rates were South Carolina, Oregon, Washington, New Hampshire, Minnesota and Utah, each with no more than 1.3 convictions per 100,000.
And Florida? Only the 20th-most corrupt, with 3.28 convictions per 100,000 — basically, just a bit above average.
Here's the full chart:
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Illinois: The only state where your license plate is made by a former governor.
Illinois wins, hands down.
Most of the corruption is institutionalized and legalized so arrests are not a realistic measure of anything. The only thing that may be a realistic quantification would be “percentage of the total cost of operating a business / living in a state resulting from government.”
If you have a fixed base percentage for services such as roads, police, fire, parks, etc then anything above that should by definition be corruption.
North Carolina should be in the top three. Our new governor McCrory is making huge strides in shutting down the “good ol’ boy” network that’s flim-flammed the citizenry for 80-100 years.
Democrat states will not convict their own.
If DC were a state...
I stand by what I said. Corruption is corruption, no matter the party.
Lackawanna County is so corrupt that big Democrat donors were overbuilding juvenile detention facilities and billing the county over $300 per day per kid incarcerated. The judges in on the scheme were sending the kids to lock-up for penny ante charges like skipping school or public smoking. Incidentally, this is the home of our idiot senior U.S. Senator Bob Casey, Jr. (Lackawanna County, not the lock-up).
Silly metric - if you’ve got corruption down to an art form (and that would be us in Illinois), the only basis for conviction is hubris to the point of no hope of escape (Blagojevich and JJ Junior) or political revenge (Ryan).
In Illinois if the corrupt don’t rock the system they ease into a comfortable retirement or move onto higher office - hell, if you play your cards right, you can get the better part of a Kenwood mansion from a known slimeball like Tony Rezko, and just use that as a convenient stepping-stone to even nicer digs on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Illinois #16? B.S.
I would like to see these broke down by party. Mississippi has 4 CDs, 3 held by Rs, one by a D. This would be helpful but still skewed. I’ve read that 25% or 4 in 100 Americans are psychopaths to some degree, I believe that among elected officials the numbers are much higher because of their skills and lack of a conscience. Those with this defect are more likely to run as a member of the party that is stronger in a particular district and a psychopath would be at ease adopting an agenda that would help him obtain his goals, usually of wealth and power. I do believe a higher % of Ds are psychopath but the Rs have theirs as well.
Yup.
And why, even if every corrupt official were caught, would working out corruption per capita even a sensible thing to do? An absolute monarchy in which the only government official with any power -- the king -- habitually takes bribes while ruling over a million people is arguably much more corrupt than a tiny city-state republic with 100,000 inhabitants, and 1000 officers of state with actual power 30 of whom can be suborned with bribes, but the per capita corruption rate in the first is .1 per 100,000, while in the latter is 30 per 100,000.
Psychopaths should read SOCIOPATHS
Pinkie is the name of the spell check.
Kalifornia’s so low because it’s a Catch and Release state due to prison overcrowding.
Prison, where Illinois governors go to retire.
This is idiotic. New York is the most corrupt state. Period. California is next. Illinois is next. Massachusetts in next. Louisiana is next. It’s all a matter of common sense.
of course, we don't teach people to think critically, so this graphic will just be accepted as a truism...
“Stupid metric.”
Yep. I don’t know why people think that stats and other analysis tools can be wielded effectively and correctly by just about anyone...
Just one more instance of the dumbing down of the populace.
Agreed.
I could simply turn this chart upside-down and proclaim that it ranks law enforcement corruption from most to least corrupt.
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