Johanna Faust, a mixed race Jew, prefers to publish pseudonymously. She is committed: first, to preventing war, ecological disaster, and nuclear apocalypse; last to not only fighting for personal privacy & the freedom of information, but, by representing herself as a soldier in that fight, to exhorting others to do the same. She is a poet, always. All these efforts find representation here: "ah, Mephistophelis" is so named after the last line of Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, whose heretical success flouted the censor for a time.

In Prison, Would-be Snitches Pay $$$ For Info: ALARMING IMPLICATIONS

Riley says: "Thank you for not snitching."
"Almost one out of every eight federal prisoners have had their sentences reduced for cooperation" notes the Southern District of Florida Blog.  "That's a huge number."  And yes, the graph on how that "breaks down" is interesting:



source

But once you get over the fact that it is overwhelmingly the upper-class criminals who are snitches, put that together with the fact that often they have no useable information.  They do, however, have money, and as the rather uncharacteristically interesting article originally posted in USA Today reports it, more and more often they make use of that money to buy their freedom.  They purchase -- for exorbitant sums -- snitch-worthy information from certain brokers into whose questionable ethics it is not within the scope of that article, nor this, to look.

They are not required to be too detailed about how they come by the information.  It appears as though verification may not be a requirement for reduction of sentence.  Which brings me to what I find is really interesting.

The felons with money are in prison for white collar crimes.  They have no information, and are purchasing it.  They are purchasing it, it appears from Mr. Heath's report, from people 'on the inside' with street connections.  Conclusions: 

• they are snitching on crimes with which they are unfamiliar;

• they are snitching on crimes for which snitching is less common;

• they are snitching on crimes for which information is available;

• they are snitching on blue-collar crimes.
From Mr. Heath's report, emphasis mine:


In early 2008, an Atlanta jail inmate facing mortgage fraud charges approached FBI agents with information about a drug trafficker who was dealing in tractor-trailer loads of marijuana and cocaine. Leon Lumsden was by then practiced at trying to use information to win a deal. At his sentencing hearing that July, so many federal agents showed up on his behalf that the judge gave him an even bigger sentence reduction than prosecutors had sought.

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