A Suffolk man who was jailed more than a decade ago for downloading more than 15,000 indecent photographs of children has been jailed again after police found a further 150,000 indecent images of children on his computer equipment.

Stephen Harris, of Prince of Wales Close, Bury St Edmunds, was sentenced to 12 months in prison at Ipswich Crown Court in 2008 and ordered to be put on the sex offenders' register.

As well as the prison sentence, he was also made the subject of a sexual offences prevention order.

On Friday (July 8) 64-year-old Harris was back before the court after admitting breaching the sexual offences prevention order on or before February 25 last year by accessing file sharing and peer-to-peer software.

He also admitted three offences of making indecent images and possessing prohibited images of children.

Sheilagh Davies, prosecuting, said that when devices belonging to Harris were analysed they were found to contain 1,279 indecent images of children and two movies in the most serious level A category, 1,558 indecent images of children in category B and 155,000 in the lowest level C category.

She said that Harris had been frank with police and had admitted that viewing indecent images of children had become an “obsession “.

He described what he’d done as “shameful and embarrassing” and said he thought his interest in the images would wane as he got older.

In addition to being jailed for 18 months, he was made the subject of a sexual harm prevention order for 10 years and was ordered to sign the sex offenders’ register for the same period.

Andrew Thompson, for Harris, said his client had not been in any trouble since receiving the prison sentence in 2008.

He said that when Harris was jailed in 2008 he hadn’t received any intervention in the form of a sex offenders’ programme and hadn’t attended such a course on his release.

“He clearly has an ongoing problem of significance that needs to be addressed,” said Mr Thompson.

He said that public protection officers had stopped visiting Harris in 2018 and were therefore no longer monitoring his use of his computer equipment.