The United States Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania announced that a 45-year-old Tobyhanna man, who admitted to producing child pornography, was sentenced this week to 270 months (22.5 years) in prison by U.S. District Court Judge Malachy E. Mannion in Scranton.

According to U.S. Attorney Peter Smith, the defendant, Robert Ferraro, previously pleaded guilty in May to using and persuading a minor to engage in sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing images of such conduct. Ferraro committed the offense between August 2013 and January 2015.The criminal conduct involved Ferraro sexually abusing a 6-year-old child, videotaping the abuse, and uploading the video to the Internet.Ferraro was indicted by a federal grand jury in March 2015 as a result of an investigation by Homeland Security Investigations, the Pennsylvania State Police and the Monroe County District Attorney's Office.Judge Mannion ordered Ferraro to serve 10 years on supervised release following his prison sentence.Ferraro must also register as a sex offender and comply with all of the requirements of the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act.This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative, which was launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse.Led by the U.S. Attorneys' Offices and the Criminal Division's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state and local resources to locate, apprehend and prosecute people who sexually exploit children, and to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit

www.usdoj.gov/psc.For more information about Internet safety education, visit

www.usdoj.gov/psc and click on the tab "resources."Assistant U.S. Attorney Francis P. Sempa prosecuted the case.