Chicago has maintained its first-place status, but not for something for which the city should be proud.
The city was once again named the corruption capital of America, according to a report released Thursday by the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The judicial district, which includes Chicago, Cook and 17 other counties across the northern tier of Illinois, reported 45 public corruption convictions for 2013 and a total of 1,642 convictions for the 38 years since 1976 when the U.S. Department of Justice began compiling the statistics, the report states.
While the city remains the most corrupt city in the nation, Illinois is not the most corrupt state.
Illinois was ranked as third most-corrupt state in the country. New York was the most corrupt state with 2,657 public corruption convictions from 1976 – 2013. California followed with 2,549 convictions and Illinois was third with 1,982.
"All of this corruption in Chicago and Illinois has real costs -- hard dollar costs and intangible costs," Dick Simpson, a political science professor at UIC and co-author of the report, said in a statement.
Simpson estimated the cost of corruption to be about $500 million per year in Illinois.
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The report indicated that police corruption, including the more than $100 million paid out to victims of Lieutenant Jon Burge, cost about $50 million each year.
"To end corruption, we as a society need to do more than convict the guys that get caught," Simpson said. "We must forge a comprehensive anti-corruption strategy carried out over at least a decade. We must create a new political culture in which public corruption is no longer tolerated. “
