Stephen Salamak, 39, must serve the full term handed down Thursday in U.S. District Court in Newark because there is no parole in the federal prison system.
Salamak struck a deal with the government and pleaded guilty in July to receipt of child pornography at a time when federal prosecutors said he tried to arrange to have sex with an 8-year-old girl through a person he thought was her mother.
The mother actually was a role-playing investigator from the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office.
The undercover investigator had responded to a Craigslist ad posted by Salamak, a criminal complaint on file in U.S. District Court in Newark alleges.
In addition to the prison term, U.S. District Judge Kevin McNulty sentenced Salamak to 10 years of supervised release.
He also will have to register as a sex offender once he's released from custody.
Salamak admitted this summer that he usedemail "to seek and obtain images of child pornography, including images of prepubescent children" while he worked as a senior corrections officer at East Jersey State Prison in Rahway, U.S. Attorney Craig Carpenito said.
Carpenito credited special agents of the Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) with the investigation leading to the plea secured by Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Alfonzo Walsman, chief of his Public Protection Unit in Newark.
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