A DANGEROUS paedophile who refuses to change his twisted attitude to child abuse is back behind bars after deliberately flouting a sexual offences prevention order.

Jason Leonard, 33, had been banned from accessing the internet and from having any encryption device when he was locked up for 32 months and given the indefinite order in June last year.

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He had been sentenced after police raided the Haslingden home he shares with his elderly mother and found a stash of hundreds of indecent photographs of youngsters on his computer.

Leonard had also been distributing the porn.

Burnley Crown Court was told officers went to his house last month to check on his welfare as he had been ‘outed’ as a sex offender by a leaflet and poster campaign in the area.

The defendant, who had been released from prison three weeks before, was asked about a laptop at the property and then unearthed an external hard drive, fitted with encryption software, which he had hidden in a plastic bag and buried in a plant pot in the kitchen.

The hard drive is being examined by police experts, but it may take months or longer because of their workload.

Leonard, who the hearing was told, thinks it’s ‘perfectly all right’ for adults to have sex with children, was afterwards recalled to prison and may not be released until the end of his licence in February 2016.

A judge has now imposed eight months in custody for what he described as a ‘very, very deliberate’ breach and said if he had had the power, he would have made it consecutive to the current sentence.

But, said Judge Andrew Woolman, Parliament ‘for reasons best known to itself’ had abolished the right of judges to return a defendant to custody to serve the balance of a sentence and to impose an additional term.

Sentencing, he told Leonard: “You are clearly a dangerous sex offender. There is no question about that. I don’t suppose that anything the court is going to do is likely to change your attitude.”

“There is no evidence at the moment that you have used your access to the internet to download indecent images of children, so I have no choice but to sentence you on what you say, that there isn’t.”

The defendant, of Pilling Street, had admitted failing to comply with the order and had been committed for sentence by Blackburn magistrates.

In June, he was also order-ed to sign the sexual offenders’ register for life after pleading guilty to five charges of distributing an indecent image of a child and five counts of making an indecent image of a child.

Bernadette Baxter, defending Leonard, said he bought the hard drive to download mainstream movies and television programmes whilst he was awaiting sentence.

She said: “He knows he should have disposed of it because of the sentence and he didn’t do so. However, he is adamant that the device, when analysed, will not reveal any indecent images of children.”

Miss Baxter said the defendant was mindful of the shame he had brought on his 77-year-old mother.