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Snitch: Informants, Cooperators, and the Corruption of Justice
This cooperator-coddling criminal justice system has ignited the infamous "Stop Snitching" movement in urban neighborhoods, deplored by everyone from the NAACP to the mayor of Boston for encouraging witness intimidation. But as Snitch shows, the movement is actually a cry against the harsh sentencing guidelines for drug-related crimes, and a call for hustlers to return to "old school" street values, like: do the crime, do the time. Combining deep knowledge of the criminal justice system with frontline true crime reporting, Snitch is a shocking and brutally troubling report about the state of American justice when it's no longer clear who are the good guys and who are the bad.
- PublisherPublicAffairs
- Publication dateNovember 27, 2007
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions9.44 x 6.49 x 1.06 inches
- Print length288 pages
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From Publishers Weekly
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Review
"This chilling investigative report explores an evil that affects almost every American... Snitch is necessary reading as we go into a presidential election year." -- Penthouse, December 2007 issue
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B001G7RCXE
- Publisher : PublicAffairs (November 27, 2007)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 288 pages
- Item Weight : 1.1 pounds
- Dimensions : 9.44 x 6.49 x 1.06 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #11,621,933 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,215 in Forensic Science Law
- #7,512 in Law Enforcement (Books)
- #7,848 in Law Enforcement Politics
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Ethan Brown is the author of four investigative reporting-driven books about crime and the criminal legal system: Murder in the Bayou, Queens Reigns Supreme, Snitch, and Shake the Devil Off.
He has written for New York magazine, The New York Observer, Wired, GQ, Mother Jones, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and The Village Voice.
He also worked for nearly a decade as a mitigation specialist for attorneys representing indigent defendants facing the death penalty in the Deep South and elsewhere.
Currently, Ethan is Enterprise Editor of The Appeal, which produces original journalism about the most significant drivers of mass incarceration, state and local criminal legal systems.
A five part docu-series based on Murder in the Bayou premiered on Showtime on September 13, 2019.
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There can be no doubt that the current regime has turned US Attorneys into Grand Inquisitors. But should we worry? Why not "just trust the Government?" After all, there can be no witchhunts without false accusations and false confessions, right? This is where Ethan Brown's book makes a truly original contribution, and to my mind delivers the coup de grace to the existing federal system. The author demonstrates how that system runs on a strict and steady diet of "incentivized witnesses" - snitches in common parlance. Mandatory minimums can be a great incentive to lie and exaggerate if you are a "target" looking to roll over on your associates. But they also create perverse secondary incentives - in federal investigators and prosecutors - to skip the expensive and boring independent investigation. When all these snitches are coming to you with free eyewitness information, why bother with the hard police work? Brown persausively and devastatingly argues that the snitch has become a crutch for the Government, to the severe detriment of the rights of the accused and the integrity of the system.
This is an extremely important book because it is written from the perspective of a serious journalist for the lay public. Practitioners frequently lose the perspective to see how truly bizzare and unfair the system has become. The public, on the other hand, can't be expected to take much interest in the various subsection headings of the US Code. Ethan Brown bridges the gap for the lay public, and one can only hope this book brings some attention to this Kafkaesque nightmare.