Guard at Chowchilla prison sentenced for trading child sex abuse videos and photos
A correctional sergeant at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla was sentenced to 15 years in prison on Monday after pleading guilty to trading pictures and videos of children being sexually assaulted, according to a news release.
Ralph Contreras Jr., 40, was no longer employed by the Chowchilla facility when he was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Kirk E. Sherriff for the receipt and distribution of child sexual abuse material, which is sometimes called child pornography, according to the release.
Contreras was indicted about a month ago by a federal jury. His attorney, Eric Schweitzer, said Contreras had seen violence inside the prison during his more than a dozen years working there and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.
“It’s apparently an addiction that went down a slippery slope (from) an addiction to pornography to an addiction to this deviant behavior,” Schweitzer said.
Schweitzer said Contreras had a “spotless” career as a correctional officer, and the judge took that into account in not sentencing Contreras to the maximum of 20 years. Contreras showed “tons and tons of remorse,” Schweitzer said.
The complaint filed in California’s Eastern District Court says Contreras admitted to investigators he liked to watch pornography depicting girls around the age of 14. Court documents include several users of the Kik smartphone app, including Contreras, asking each other for videos and images of child sexual assault material.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office said he sought images of prepubescent minors between Sept. 29, 2024, and Jan. 2, 2025.
Among the items discovered by investigators, were rape scenes that depicted adult men assaulting girls as young as 6 or 8, according to court records.
