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Reveals the secretive, inaccurate, and often violent ways that the American criminal system really works
Curtis Flowers spent twenty-three years on death row for a murder he did not commit. Atlanta police killed 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston during a misguided raid on her home. Rachel Hoffman was murdered at age twenty-three while working for Florida police.
Such tragedies are consequences of snitching. Although it is nearly invisible to the public, the massive informant market shapes the American legal system in risky and sometimes shocking ways. Police rely on criminal suspects to obtain warrants, to perform surveillance, and to justify arrests. Prosecutors negotiate with defendants for information and cooperation, offering to drop charges or lighten sentences in exchange. In this book, Alexandra Natapoff provides a comprehensive analysis of this powerful and problematic practice. She shows how informant deals generate unreliable evidence, allow serious criminals to escape punishment, endanger the innocent, and exacerbate distrust between police and poor communities of color.
First published over ten years ago, Snitching has become known as the “informant bible,” a leading text for advocates, attorneys, journalists, and scholars. This influential book has helped free the innocent, it has fueled reform at the state and federal level, and it is frequently featured in high-profile media coverage of snitching debacles. This updated edition contains a decade worth of new stories, new data, new legislation and legal developments, much of it generated by the book itself and by Natapoff’s own work. In clear, accessible language, the book exposes the social destruction that snitching can cause in heavily-policed Black neighborhoods, and how using criminal informants renders our entire penal process more secretive and less fair. By delving into the secretive world of criminal informants, Snitching reveals deep and often disturbing truths about the way American justice really works.
"The supply [of cooperators] is endless. I should know. There were at least three in the trials against me. After it was discovered that the first two cooperators had been offered favors and weren’t telling the truth, they never appeared again. The state just produced a new one. This book really explains how this process worked in my trials, and how it still works in others’. My hope is that this book shines a light so that other people do not have to suffer through what I did."
"This book […] was a godsend for me, especially as we fought to get ‘Rachel’s Law’ passed. The book educated all of us in such a meaningful way: legislators, law students and family members and friends."
"Superb . . .a searing indictment of how the secretive dynamics of informing have helped corrupt inner city life in America, and a deep scholarly analysis of how our legal rules contribute to this problem and can be reformed to mitigate it. This brilliantly original book is ...wise and ruthlessly honest in its understanding of the street level practices of informant-reliance."
"One of the truly impressive contributions of the book comes in [Natapoff’s] explanation of the effects of widespread use of informants for the criminal justice system, our social structures, and our democracy. . . . Snitching should find a place in every law school course looking at legal issues in the criminal justice arena, and on the syllabi of every university course in criminal justice that aims to give students a realistic and nuanced view of how the system really works."