Which American states convict the most corrupt officials

ROD BLAGOJEVICH, a former governor of Illinois, begins his 14-year prison sentence on Thursday March 15th. He was convicted last year of bribery, wire fraud and trying to sell a Senate seat. He is the fourth governor of Illinois out of the last seven to be convicted, and adds to the 1,828 public corruption convictions the state saw between 1976 and 2010. A report by the University of Illinois at Chicago estimates that corruption costs the state more than $500m a year. Two states had even higher numbers of appointees, government employees (and a few private individuals) convicted of public corruption: New York, with 2,522 convictions and California with 2,345 convictions. Of the largest states though, Illinois had the highest per person conviction rate, at 1.4 per 10,000 population. With little over 600,000 residents, the District of Columbia had a rate of nearly 17. This is partly because the Justice Department and other federal agencies with headquarters in DC try some corruption cases there irrespective of where the offence took place.