Watching Porn on California’s Death Row

Under Gavin Newsom, state prisoners are turning taxpayer-funded tablets into personal sex machines.

Under Governor Gavin Newsom, California has sought to transform its massive prison system into a Nordic-style rehabilitation program. Newsom has placed a moratorium on all executions, transferred condemned prisoners to facilities across the state, dismantled San Quentin State Prison’s death row, and turned the notorious prison into a therapeutic center, with art, classrooms, a café, and podcast studios.

As part of this transformation, the Newsom administration approved a $189 million contract to provide new digital tablets—generic, flat-screen devices in a plastic shell—to every inmate in the state prison system, at “no cost” to offenders. The administration heralded the effort to replace inmates’ old tablets—which were piloted in 2018 and given to nearly all prisoners by 2023—as a step toward “digital equity” for “justice impacted” individuals, who could, in theory, use the devices to contact their families, consume “educational” content, and “learn new technology.”

In reality, taxpayer-funded tablets have also been used for more lurid endeavors. In this exclusive City Journal investigation, we contacted dozens of death-row inmates, who told us that prisoners in the state system use such devices to watch pornography and have explicit sexual conversations. Some prisoners, according to a former high-ranking California corrections official, use their tablets to groom minors. Though the state has claimed to regulate explicit content, the inmates told us that users can easily evade detection.

When reached for comment, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said the tablets were “tightly controlled education tools” that provided inmates with “access to the Bible, education, and reentry resources that actually reduce crime.”

But inmates told us a different story. For some, the devices have become personal sex machines. In the words of one inmate, California’s death row is populated with desperately “horny” criminals who see the tablets as a way to satisfy their basest fantasies and desires—all thanks to the California taxpayer.

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In the 1980s, a rapist and serial murderer named Robert Maury earned the nickname “the Tipster Killer” for calling in anonymous tips identifying the locations of the dead bodies he left behind. During this period, he killed a woman by strangling her with a nylon clothesline, strangled and killed another two women, and brutally raped a fourth before he was caught by authorities.

Now, Maury is living at a state prison facility in Stockton, California, where he has viewed pornography on his taxpayer-funded digital tablet. In an interview, Maury told us inmates can receive “nude pictures” and watch pornography through their devices. In his case, he claimed to have received a topless photo from a 22-year-old German psychology student who was “hoping that I would share my story with her for her class project.” After the student sent the photo, Maury said he “flirted” with her “for a while.”

Maury said another way that inmates can watch pornography is through the video chat application. In this scheme, he explained, an inmate can call someone on the outside, that person can “put porn on their TV,” and the inmate can “watch with them.” Maury specified that he has never explicitly asked anyone to broadcast pornography in this manner, but when it happens, he “just say[s] cool and thank you.”

Samuel Amador, another serial killer who was sentenced to death, had a similar experience. He said inmates watch pornographic videos and have sexually explicit conversations through their tablets. The videos, he said, are delivered in “30 second clips.” Amador has created a rotation on his tablet between explicit and wholesome content: “I watch porn an[d] short clips of my family at the Beach.”

Sometimes, guards catch lewd messages, Amador said. But, in general, the restrictions are easy to evade. “[T]hey try to prevent us,” he said about sexting, “but we get around their bullshit.”

Jamar Tucker, a capital inmate at High Desert State Prison who has killed three men, noted the system’s loopholes. He indicated that while the rules prohibit inmates from receiving nude photos, he has received videos of women “dancing . . . in a thong.” He uses racy photos, he says, for sexual pleasure.

The potential for abuse is obvious. The Newsom administration has made the tablet program universal, with no access-restrictions based on offense. And inmates, including child predators, can communicate with members of the public through their tablets, apparently with no age restrictions, at a cost of five cents per text message or 16 cents per minute of video.

In a recent case, Nathaniel Ray Diaz, who was convicted of committing sex crimes against a 12-year-old girl, allegedly used a prison-issued tablet to contact and exploit her from inside Avenal State Prison. Diaz allegedly told the girl to send him sexually explicit images, which he received through a co-conspirator. The girl reportedly told investigators that Diaz forced her to speak with him through the tablet “for hours, every day,” from the time she came home from school until the prison phones turned off at midnight.

Prosecutors alleged that, in total, Diaz made “thousands of calls” to the girl, violating a no-contact order and—by soliciting explicit photographs and exploiting a minor—committing additional child sex crimes. The Eastern District of California Attorney’s Office told us that Diaz is in custody awaiting trial.

Douglas Eckenrod, former deputy director of California’s adult parole operations, indicated that the Diaz case is only the tip of the iceberg. He was in the room as the state discussed expanding the tablet program after an initial test run, and had raised concerns about pornography, grooming, and other abuses. These were apparently brushed aside. Now, he says, there is no way to monitor the nearly 90,000 inmates in the state prison system who have access to taxpayer-funded devices.

“I would bet my pension that there’s a vast amount of childhood pornography on the tablets,” said the former official. “There are probably several thousand [children] that are currently being groomed.”

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What is California doing to stop this abuse? Last month, state officials attempted to tighten restrictions on prison tablets, formally banning obscene text messages, sexually explicit images, and sexual behavior on video calls. But death-row inmates we interviewed said that prisoners could easily bypass the restrictions.

Maury, the serial killer, indicated that prisoners, especially younger men who “grew up with the Internet,” have found ways to continue viewing pornography and sending sexual messages to the outside. “If you try hard enough,” he said, there “is always a way around the system.”

Meantime, despite the obvious risks, Governor Gavin Newsom is moving full-speed ahead with his initiative to “reimagine our prison system” and turn San Quentin into “the nation’s most innovative rehabilitation facility.” Newsom has offered no indication that he will reverse course on the free tablet program. In fact, the new vendor contract allows for four one-year extensions, which could push its total cost to $315 million. At least one Democratic legislator is demanding that the state make inmates’ messages free of charge.

Eckenrod, who anticipated the dark side of “digital equity,” believes California has opened the floodgates to abuse. “We created a pathway for them to reach out and groom folks,” he said. “There are going to be victims that didn’t need to have been victims because of these decisions.”

Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Haley Strack is an investigative reporter at City Journal.