The snitching hour: investigations and interviewing in a county jail

Researchers have been interested in police investigations for a half-century or more. In the academic literature, however, there is virtually no examination of analogous investigation units and investigators that operate exclusively in jails, prisons, or detention centers, despite these units being in nearly all large local, state, and federal facilities. The purpose of the present study was to bring one unit's operations to light. We conducted focus groups with current and former correctional investigators regarding the tempo of their work, the various natures of their investigations, and how the investigators viewed their place within broader criminal justice operations. A major component of the corrections-based operations includes investigative interviews of inmates for intelligence-gathering purposes, and we identified a process model of correctional investigations that may be applicable to the wider field of correctional intelligence units.