Snitching: The Institutional And Communal Consequences

By Alexandra Natapoff, Associate Professor of Law, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles

The classic "criminal informant" with whom this article is concerned is a person who trades information about others in order to obtain lenience for his or her own crimes. This writing does not address informants who work solely for money, or citizen informants who provide information to the police without recompense.

The use of criminal informants in the U.S. justice system has become a flourishing socio-legal institution unto itself. Characterized by secrecy, unfettered law enforcement discretion, and informal negotiations with criminal suspects, the informant institution both embodies and exacerbates some of the most problematic features of the criminal justice process.

Every year tens of thousands of criminal suspects -- many of them drug offenders concentrated in high-crime inner-city neighbor-hoods -- informally negotiate away liability in exchange for promised cooperation. Law enforcement meanwhile recruits and relies on ever-greater numbers of criminal actors in making basic decisions about investigations and prosecutions.

While this marriage of convenience is fraught with peril, it is nearly devoid of judicial or public scrutiny as to the propriety, fairness, or utility of the deals being struck. Moreover, it both exemplifies and exacerbates existing problems with transparency, accountability, regularity, and fairness within the criminal process.

The caustic effects of the informant institution are not limited to the legal system. They can have a disastrous impact in low-income, high-crime, urban communities where a high percentage of residents -- predominantly young African American men -- are in contact with the criminal justice system and therefore potentially under pressure to snitch.

The law enforcement practice of relying heavily on snitching creates large numbers of criminal informants who are communal liabilities. Snitches increase crime and threaten social organization, interpersonal relationships, and socio-legal norms in their home communities, even as they are tolerated or under-punished by law enforcement because they are useful.

(Editor: Alexandra Natapoff is an Associate Professor of Law, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. J.D., Stanford Law School; B.A., Yale University. alexandra.natapoff@lls.edu.

Many questions and concerns raised in this excerpt from her Introduction derive from previous experience as Assistant Federal Public Defender and working as an advocate in low-income communities of color. Her entire study is available online at: www.law.uc.edu/lawreview/uclaw73pdf/0645natapoff.pdf)

Bibliography

(A. Natapoff's article is extensively footnoted, and the following research can lay the foundation for any student of 'snitching.' Listed here are only a few.

Graham Hughes, Agreements for Cooperation in Criminal Cases, 45 VAND. L. REV. 1 (1992); Ian Weinstein, Regulating the Market for Snitches, 47 BUFF. L. REV. 563 (1999); George C. Harris, Testimony for Sale: The Law and Ethics of Snitches and Experts, 28 PEPP. L. REV. 1 (2000); Daniel C. Richman, Cooperating Clients, 56 OHIO ST. L.J. 69 (1995); Clifford S. Zimmerman, Toward a New Vision of Informants: A History of Abuses and Suggestions for Reform, 22 HASTINGS CONST. L.Q. 81 (1994). See Bureau Of Justice Statistics, Sourcebook Of Criminal Justice Statistics Table 5.26 (2001); Michael A. Simons, Retribution for Rats: Cooperation, Punishment, and Atonement, 56 VAND. L. REV. 1, 7-14 (2003); 5. See Daniel Richman, Cooperating Defendants: The Costs and Benefits of Purchasing Information from Scoundrels, 8 FED. SENT. REP. 292, 294 (1996); Steven Greer, Towards a Sociological Model of the Police Informant, 46 BRIT. J. SOCIOL. 509, 509 (1995); William J. Stuntz, The Pathological Politics of Criminal Law, 100 MICH. L. REV.505, 508 (2001); Erik Luna,Transparent Policing, 85 IOWA L. REV. 1107 (2000); Gerald E. Lynch, Our Administrative System of Criminal Justice, 66; FORDHAM L. REV. 2117 (1998); Eric Lotke, Hobbling a Generation: Young African American Men in D.C.'s Criminal Justice System Five Years Later (Nat'l Ctr. on Insts. and Alternatives, Alexandria, VA), Aug. 1997, at http://66.165.94.98/stories/hobblgen0897.html; Jerome G. Miller, Hobbling a Generation: Young African-American Males in the Criminal Justice System of America's Cities: Baltimore, Maryland (Nat'l Ctr. on Insts. and Alternatives, Alexandria, VA), Sept. 1992, at http://66.165.94.98/stories/hobblgen0992.html. ; Marc Mauer & Tracy Huling, The Sentencing Project, Young Black Americans And The Criminal Justice System: Five Years Later (1995). Nearly 40% of African American offenders are incarcerated for drug-related offenses. Incarcerated America, Human Rights Watch Backgrounder (Human Rights Watch, New York, NY), Apr. 2003, at 3, available at http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/usa/incarceration/; Punishment: The Collateral Consequences Of Mass Imprisonment (Marc Mauer & Meda Chesney-Lind, eds. 2002); "Order in the Inner City," 32 Law & Society Rev. 805 (1998).