by Zoe Pollock
Rob Walker recounts the heartbreaking story of 46-year-old fast-food employee John Horner, who was caught by a police informant for selling painkillers. Under Florida law, Horner would be sentenced to 25 years unless he became an informant:
Horner says the problem for him, as someone with no previous drug arrests, was finding drug dealers to inform on.
“You start running the streets. You go to the places where drug dealers go, trying to find drugs. “I had gotten to the point at the end, I was desperate, I didn’t care who went to jail. I would have taken anybody down, just so I could be with my family,” says Horner.
[Law professor Alexandra Natapoff] says this is the danger the informant system poses. “We’ve created thousands of little criminal entrepreneurs running around looking for other people to snitch on,” she says. “And when they don’t have information we’ve created a massive incentive for them to create it.”
Horner is serving the full 25 years because he never found anyone to snitch on:
“What snitching does is it rewards the informed, so the lower you are on the totem pole of criminal activity, the less useful you are to the government,” says Natapoff. “The higher up in the hierarchy you are, the more you have to offer.”
The Dish 