In 2008 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officially confirmed that it had around 15,000 secret employees on its payroll. These were not regular or undercover police officers but informers who toiled across the United States at the behest of the FBI. That their activities do not receive more attention is down to a combination of the secrecy of their work, the prevalence of their activities, and the nature of the communities they target. Informers and informing are, of course, nothing new. The practice and the practitioners have been around for centuries. It is with the rise of the modern state, however, that the activity and those who carry it out have been institutionalized and become an integral part of the system.

The centrality of informing and informers is certainly the case in the United States, as Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice, by Professor Alexandra Natapoff of the Loyola Law School University, Los Angeles, reveals. This legal study is a thoughtful and important work that needs to be read, particularly by those in positions of power within the American justice system. For Natapoff demonstrates across this well-written and engaging book that American-style justice at all levels has become increasingly and problematically dependent on informers.

Nowhere is the dependence on informing greater than in the pursuit of crime, which in the detailed depiction that Natapoff offers is both the prime strength and the heart of the book. This is clearly a contemporary study and, if there is a fault, it is that the book provides little historical context to the current system. Some of the practices and issues Natapoff identifies have been around for decades. For instance, the practice of some police of supplying drugs to informers who are drug addicts may be controversial in the present but it was also controversial in the 1920s when Canadian police discovered their American colleagues were doing it. Nor did the aggressive use of informers as a tool of disruption against political targets by the FBI begin with the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO); it stretches back decades earlier.

In the twenty-first century, Natapoff depicts a system where the police increasingly rely on informers to develop cases, particularly when pursuing the drug trade. In turn, the testimony of these same informers becomes crucial to obtaining convictions once the enterprise reaches a courtroom. The informers certainly do not go unrewarded for their efforts. Indeed, for some snitching has become a lucrative career path with high rewards. Take, for instance, Andrew Chambers, who made up to $4 million snitching for a number of US government agencies. And for individuals like him a criminal record is no impediment to a career in informing.

One by-product of a system so dependent on secret practice combined with murky characters is victimization. Individuals end up wrongly convicted of crimes (one study estimated that 20 percent of wrongful convictions in the state of California were because of bogus evidence from informers). The police become caught up in a system in which outright illegal activity among informers is either ignored or even encouraged in the pursuit of arrests. Most insidiously of all, those more likely to experience the damage done by informing tend to be communities already marginalized within American society because of ethnicity and class. Sadly, one of the reasons why informing does not receive more mainstream attention in the United States is because of the makeup of those most affected by the practice, although some of these communities, controversially to some, have begun to fight back through anti-snitching campaigns.

To her credit, Natapoff is not content simply to diagnose the problems of the system. She provides an extensive chapter with suggestions grounded in reality on how to address the problems that the rest of the book has diagnosed. One key area, she points out, is to improve communication with those communities that are damaged by informing. Ultimately, however, much of the reform will have to be initiated by those who benefit from the current system and potentially have the most to lose from changing the status quo.