The seemingly endless parade of Illinois politicians who face sentencing at Chicago’s Dirksen Federal Courthouse has led over the years to a popular defense argument — that sending a corrupt politician to prison won’t stop the next one.
The argument was most recently made by a lawyer for ex-state Rep. Luis Arroyo, who wrote in a court memo that Arroyo was “undeterred” by prior news reports about criminally charged politicians, and that prison “is no more effective than draining Lake Michigan with a spoon.”
