A VOYEUR who breached a sexual offences prevention order banning him from spying on women in public toilets is back behind bars.

Adrian Porter was caught in the women's toilets at Newport's Kingsway Centre on July 8.

Security staff found he had removed a panel from one of the cubicles and when they checked CCTV footage found he had also entered the toilets on July 2 and 3.

Porter, of no fixed abode, told them he had mistaken them for the gents but was arrested.

He later admitted breaching a Sexual Offences Prevention Order (SOPO) imposed on him in 2010, at Gwent Police's request, banning him from entering or attempting to enter any public toilets except those exclusively for men, following a string similar offences.

He pleaded guilty to the breaches at Cardiff Crown Court. Porter, 36, has a notched up a raft of convictions for public order and voyeurism offences over the past 15 years.

Prosecutor David Webster told how in 1998 Proctor peered under the toilet cubicle as a women was using it in Cardiff's Littlewoods store, and did the same in 2000 in the city's David Morgan's department store.

Later the same year he locked himself inside the women's toilet at Blackwood Bus Station and in 2001 was caught peering into a house in Caerphilly from the garden on five separate occasions.

In 2002 he was convicted for staring into the bedroom of a 12-year-old girl from a flat roof in Newport and was jailed in 2004 for robbing a pensioner's bag as he watched her in a toilet.

Four years later in 2008 he was back behind bars when he was caught trying to watch women in the toilets in the Morrisons store in Rogerstone, Newport, before serving a further sentence in 2010 for hiding in the ceiling of a toilet at McDonald's in Cardiff and cutting peep holes in it.

In 2011, again at Blackwood Bus Station toilets, he altered the layout of the room so he could spy on the occupants.

The court heard he also has a conviction for possessing extreme indecent images.

William Cordingley, defending, said Proctor seemed to have an unspecified complicated psychological issue.

He said he accepts he has a "serious" problem that lead him to behave in this way and wants to sort it out.

Judge Tom Crowther QC said Proctor appeared to have a "life time obsession" with this type of activity.

He said the problem was escalating and was not a harmless one.

Sentencing him to 16 months in prison, he said: "What you do is invade spaces in which women rightly have the expectation of absolute privacy. This conduct is not harmless and it has the capacity to cause feelings of great embarrassment, even shame and distress."

"It follows that I am of the view that this breaches are so serious only custody can be justified."

Proctor must comply with the SOPO until it expires in October 2012.