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California Gave Prisoners iPads. They Used Them to Watch Porn.
Did you know that Gavin Newsom approved a $189 million plan to give free tablets to California prisoners? The program launched in 2018 and expanded to nearly all state prisons in 2023. It has gone as you would expect.
Intended to promote “digital equity” for “justice impacted” individuals, the initiative has actually led to locked-up criminals watching pornography, receiving nude photos, and allegedly stalking and grooming children.
Stories range from inmates FaceTiming friends outside the prison and watching adult videos through the calls, coercing a 12-year-old into sending sexually explicit images, and flirting with a German psychology student and receiving a photo of her with no shirt. Who could have possibly predicted that these kinds of things would happen?