The New Yorker article is generating new awareness and a lot of great discussion about young informants and the use of criminal informants more generally. TalkLeft discusses the overall challenges of informant use here: Informants as Pawns in the War on Drugs. NPR’s Talk of the Nation did a special segment on the topic here: Use of Confidential Informants Mostly Unregulated.
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New Yorker story on young informants
The New Yorker has just published an important story on the use of young vulnerable informants. It discusses numerous cases in which young people have lost their lives trying to work off their own offenses, and reveals how common the practice is and how little protection the law and police typically provide. Synopsis here: The Throwaways: Police enlist young offenders as confidential informants. But the work is high-risk, largely unregulated, and sometimes fatal.
An alternative to snitching for juvenile drug offenders?
Using juvenile offenders as informants can be the opposite of rehabilitation: it keeps young people in contact with criminal networks and can exacerbate drug use and other dangerous behaviors. See this post on a Miami juvenile informant. But a new “restorative justice” approach in Texas offers a different model, in which juveniles charged with serious drug offenses are offered a chance at rehabilitation and skills training. Here’s the NYTimes article: New Home for Juveniles Recruited to the Drug Trade. Almost no states regulate the law enforcement policy of turning young people into informants (see Dennis, Juvenile Snitches); the Texas experiment reminds us that the juvenile system is first and foremost supposed to be rehabilitative.
NYT Magazine on the complexity of snitching
Some of you may remember Alex White, the Atlanta informant who revealed the police corruption that killed 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston. This Sunday’s NYT Magazine details the often unbelievable twists and turns of that saga, from Johnston’s shooting to White’s career as a snitch for multiple local and federal agencies, to the Congressional hearing and prosecutions that ensured. A great window into the police/informant world: A Snitch’s Dilemma.
Radio interview: Law & Disorder, WBAI-New York
Here’s an interview I did with the syndicated radio show Law & Disorder, hosted by Heidi Baghosian, Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild, Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and New York attorney Michael Smith: Law & Disorder, April 23, 2012, (about 9 minutes in).