Invest in Private Prisons and Get Tough on Crime

I am still trying to discern whether this is satire, or if you are just really sick in the head. Profiting from, and incentivizing incarceration is disgusting.

Anna:
Here is your first inmate for your private prison.

Ed Buck sentenced to 30 years in prison for abuses that led to men’s drug deaths

Ed Buck, once a fixture of West Hollywood’s political scene, was sentenced Thursday to 30 years in prison for drug and sex crimes that included providing lethal doses of methamphetamine to two men.

To the outside world, Buck was a champion of causes such as fur bans and AIDS awareness, and a donor to Democratic officeholders.

But behind the walls of his Laurel Avenue apartment was a nightmare. For nearly a decade, the wealthy, white Buck lured young Black men at the lowest points in their lives — homeless, addicted, resorting to subsistence-level sex work — into what he called “party and play” sessions.

Amid squalor that belied his reputation as a man who had achieved great wealth at a young age, Buck plied the men with drugs and then sexually assaulted them while they were unconscious or immobile. In two cases, he injected his victims with fatal amounts of methamphetamine.

A jury convicted Buck last year of a host of felonies, including distributing methamphetamine resulting in death and enticement to cross state lines to engage in prostitution.

In the lead-up to Thursday’s sentencing at the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles, Buck’s lawyers had asked that the 67-year-old receive a sentence that would one day allow him to return to society, while prosecutors urged U.S. District Judge Christina A. Snyder to send Buck to prison for the rest of his life. Such a sentence was needed not only to punish Buck, they argued, but to protect the public.

“If Buck were ever released,” they wrote, “he would feed his compulsion to inject others until the day he died.”

On Thursday, Chelsea Norell, an assistant U.S. attorney, reiterated the need to put Buck behind bars for good, telling Snyder: “One death is a tragedy, but two is a pattern.”

Buck, speaking in a low, raspy voice, offered his “condolences” to the families of his victims but denied he had caused their deaths. Describing how he had spent much of his life advocating for political causes and gay and animal rights, he asked that Snyder “take a look at my life in total,” and not “the horrible caricature the government painted me as — a meth-fueled ax killer.”

Before sentencing Buck, Snyder said his case was “one of the most difficult and tragic” she had ever presided over.

“What has happened here is reprehensible,” she said.

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Drug abuse was at the heart of Buck’s sexual behavior, according to testimony and evidence presented at his 2021 trial, which opened a window into a dark subculture of Los Angeles’ gay community.

Buck moved in a world steeped in drugs and defined by power imbalances between the solicitors of sex and the often destitute men who supply it. He advertised on Adam4Adam, a gay hookup site, that he was interested in “party and play” sessions, widely known to mean using methamphetamine during sex.

A parade of men testified that Buck would offer them extra money if they “slammed,” or allowed him to inject them with the drug. In what prosecutors called a “carrot-and-stick approach,” he would sometimes withhold payment if they didn’t smoke enough methamphetamine or let him inject them.

In his squalid apartment, which was littered with drug paraphernalia and sex toys, Buck treated the men “like lab rats in his twisted experiments,” Norell wrote in a sentencing memo.

He drugged them to the limit of their bodies’ tolerance; once they were unconscious or immobile, he sexually assaulted them, choked them, slapped them. One man, injected with something that left him unable to move, managed to regain control of his body only when Buck revved a chain saw in front of him, sending adrenaline coursing.

Buck filmed many of the episodes. In a video played at trial, he gave stage directions to a masked man who was smoking methamphetamine: “Stare directly into the camera, flare your nostrils and blow it out slowly. Now, if you add wide-open eyes to that, it would be a perfect shot.”

One witness, Carlos, described learning from a friend that a man would pay him $200 to smoke methamphetamine and “prance around in underwear.” Living under an overpass at the time, shuffling between encampments in Hawthorne, West Athens and Gardena, “I had to fight to survive,” he testified. “I had to fight to do what I could to eat, to take care of myself, to still be a father.”

To protect their privacy, The Times withheld the last names of witnesses who described being sexually abused.

Carlos went to Buck’s apartment about 20 times over a six-month period. He’d use methamphetamine and GHB, a party drug; sometimes, Buck would spray an ethyl chloride cleaning solvent on a rag, hold it over Carlos’ mouth and watch him inhale.

Buck “liked to see me where I was barely able to stand, barely conscious,” he recalled. “He wanted me to be falling around all over the place,” a state in which Buck “would be able to do whatever he liked as far as touching and everything of that sort.”

Buck at times referred to Black men using the N-word, witnesses testified at trial.

Two men died in Buck’s apartment, their bodies found in near-identical circumstances. Gemmel Moore, 26, flew in from Texas on July 27, 2017, on a ticket that Buck had purchased. Hours later, he was dead. A coroner’s investigator found Moore lying on a mattress with pornography playing on the television. Syringes, pipes, sex toys and methamphetamine were found throughout the apartment.

“This is so dark,” Cory McLean, Moore’s friend, said as he addressed Buck at Thursday’s hearing. “No one could even fathom that this was real, this was true. And you created it.”
https://news.yahoo.com/ed-buck-face-judgment-injecting-120014614.html