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to see which states saw the greatest number of convictions per 100,000 (Madigan actually appears to cite slightly outdated data; the latest covers the period between 2002 and 2011).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 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.
