CHICAGO – Former Gov. George Ryan was released from prison before dawn Wednesday, stopping only briefly at a halfway house before he was allowed to travel home to serve the rest of his sentence for corruption.

By midday, the 78-year-old was sitting in the living room of his spacious home in a leafy northern Illinois neighborhood in Kankakee, beaming and surrounded by his children and grandchildren, said Ryan's attorney and also a former governor, Jim Thompson.

"If you could see his and his grandkids' smiling faces," said Thompson, speaking by phone from Ryan's house. "He is surrounded by happy faces."