BENTON — A federal judge on Monday sentenced a former Illinois Department of Corrections payroll worker who stole about $125,000 from the agency to two months in prison and 18 months of supervised release.

Maggi Tudor, 34, pleaded guilty in July to a monthslong scheme to embezzle the money from the state of Illinois. She did so by using her position as a payroll technician at Pinckneyville Correctional Center to falsify the overtime and holiday pay of her husband, who worked as a correctional officer at the prison’s satellite campus, the Murphysboro Life Skills Re-Entry Center, federal court records show.

After accepting her position at IDOC in 2021, Tudor doctored her husband’s payroll records for about two and a half years, from July 1, 2022, through Dec. 30, 2024, according to a stipulation of facts she signed while pleading guilty this summer.

Tudor, who was charged in January, last received pay from the state of Illinois in March and earned about $11,900 this year, according to the Illinois comptroller’s salary database. She earned about $58,100 in 2025.

Tudor’s lawyer, Nicholas Williams, told the court during her sentencing hearing on Monday that she’d stolen the money as the family fell on hard financial times and was at risk of losing their farm in rural Washington County, where Tudor was raised and had lived for more than three decades. He said she was deeply sorry for her actions and asked the court to forgo a prison sentence beyond time already served.

In a lengthy memorandum filed with the court, Williams said Tudor was raised under the thumb of a demanding father and had few social interactions as a child until she attended Nashville High School, where she met her future husband. After becoming pregnant in high school, the two were married and returned to the family farm. They went on to have three more children.

Their fourth child arrived in 2021, and after the baby’s birth, Tudor likely suffered from postpartum depression, though she didn’t receive a diagnosis in treatment, in part because she lacked the time and money, according to Williams’ memorandum.

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Their two youngest children began showing signs of speech delays around the same time, and the couple enrolled them in educational programs.

Their finances were further strained when Tudor’s father asked to borrow money so he wouldn’t lose the farm. They gave him $5,000, depleting their savings account. Her father then suffered a sudden stroke and died in late 2022, triggering a stressful probate process.

The irony of the situation, Williams told Chief Judge Staci Yandle, is that “she had to sell that land in order to make the restitution today.” She’d brought to court a check for the full amount of restitution she owed the state: $124,917.

Federal sentencing guidelines called for Tudor, who had no prior criminal history, to serve between eight and 14 months in prison, though the court is not bound by those recommendations.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathleen Howard on Monday told the court that the government believed that even though Tudor planned to pay the full restitution that day, something Howard called “extraordinary rare in these types of cases” to happen at sentencing, if any money is repaid at all, prison time was appropriate so that others who consider stealing public funds understand that “it will not go unpunished.”

Howard told the court that Tudor “found a loophole” in the accounting system, and instead of doing the responsible thing and alerting supervisors, she used what she’d learned to benefit her family. In doing so, Howard said Tudor “betrayed the state of Illinois,” the public trust and her IDOC colleagues.

In its sentencing memorandum filed with the court before the hearing, the government argued that the offense was made more serious because of the position of public trust she held and “the brazenness by which she committed her crimes.”

The defendant abused her position “to make quick money for her family, and she did so rather openly,” the memorandum read, adding that Tudor “did not stop until she was confronted with her actions.”

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Yandle said that not requiring a prison term would send the wrong message. While prison terms rarely work as a deterrent in drug, gun and child prostitution cases, which make up the majority of those coming before the court in Benton, Yandle said that a prison sentence in Tudor’s case would send a powerful message to those considering financial crimes, signaling that people who engage in public corruption will face serious consequences for their actions.

After her two-month prison sentence, Tudor is to serve the first six months of her supervised release on home confinement.

In a statement before the court, Tudor apologized to her colleagues at IDOC, some of whom she described as “truly great friends,” and her family. She told the court she regrets her actions and would spend the years ahead trying to rebuild the trust she’d broken.

And while conceding that returning the pay she’d stolen from the state didn’t erase her actions, Tudor said, “it was important for me to follow through on that responsibility.”

This story was produced by Southern Illinois Source, the Illinois Press Foundation’s nonprofit news collaborative serving the bottom third of the state in partnership with the Southern Illinois University Charlotte Thompson Suhler School of Journalism and Advertising.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.