Just to add on
I grew up in the suburbs with both parents. A lot of people didn't have that luxury growing up. They come from broken homes with no parents, being raised by an aunt or a grandmother. A lot of kids that grow up in the ghetto never had their own bedroom. They had to share a room with brothers and/or cousins, in some cases poor kids from the ghetto sleep on the couch or on the floor.
They grow up in an environment where the adults don't work and collect SSI or SSD checks. On food stamps, welfare and section 8 housing. When they grow up around adults that don't work their perception of reality is skewed. When they get your first job at 16 years old they have a difficult time taking orders from their boss. They don't want to be told what to do because in their world, thats being a sucker.
When these kids go to jail its not that bad because they grew up in hell. They get 3 hots and a cot. They don't think jail is that bad because they never had a stable environment in the first place. The clinical term is: Institutionalized. Basically it means they had no structure growing up and jail provides them with the structure they never had. A person that grew up in a broken home might say that serving a 20 year sentence is no big deal, while a person that grew up in a middle class home with working parents thinks that 20 years in prison is the worst thing they could imagine.
My point is that people who say they'd never snitch and they'd rather serve 20 years than snitch on their homies are institutionalized in the first place. They never had a chance of living a normal life and became a statistic. And they know this so they go back and forth to prison because it makes sense to them. Working for the whiteman doesn't make sense and in many cases they never finish school (I mean high school) so the jobs that are available to them are few and far between.
Anyway, be leery of a person who says they'd never snitch. A lot of those people are institutionalized and can't make it on the outside so they'd rather be in prison anyway.
Giving up an additional 15 years of your life to "keep it real" is absurd to me.
I think its more "real" to snitch to get your sentence reduced.