Ethan Brown joins us this week at TPMCafe's Book Club to discuss his new book, Snitch: Informants, Cooperators and the Corruption of Justice.

Brown gets us started with a review of how he came to the thesis of his book; namely, that the federal criminal justice system has been skewed by a "cottage industry" of informants that emerged following the introduction of the federal sentencing guidelines.

Participating with Brown in this week's discussion will be Professor Douglas Berman, Professor Alexandra Natapoff, Professor Mark Kleiman and John McWhorter, columnist for the New York Sun and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Kleiman's first post is already up, suggesting that Brown "nearly chokes on his outrage and, as a result, fails to come to grips with the hard choices." That should get some discussion going.