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“Official corruption prosecutions and convictions have been declining long-term. But that’s not necessarily because there’s less official corruption going on,” Long said.
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Convictions for official corruption aren’t common — there’s only one for every million people in the U.S. — and they’ve steadily dropped over the past two decades, federal data shows.
Susan B. Long tracks such convictions nationally as co-founder and co-director of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research center affiliated with Syracuse University.
“Official corruption prosecutions and convictions have been declining long-term. But that’s not necessarily because there’s less official corruption going on,” Long said.
Such convictions fell by half since 2003, when there were more than 600 nationally, to just over 300 last year, with a two-decade low of about 250 in 2020 at the height of pandemic-driven government shutdowns, the center found. Twice as many local public officials were convicted last year as either state or federal officials, data shows.
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