Death of former PIE leader

It is reported that Steven Freeman, former leader of Britain's Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) in the 1980s, has died in hospital from Covid-19 while serving an indeterminate prison sentence that began in 2011. See here:

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9148815/Former-leader-notorious-paedophile-network-wanted-abolish-age-consent-dies-aged-66.html

I was Steve's predecessor as Chair of PIE and knew him well. We were not great friends, to be honest. We had our differences.

I can unhesitatingly say, though, that he was not the monster portrayed in the media (the Scottish Sun's report actually uses that word), nor did he deserve to languish in prison for nearly a decade with no end in sight to his incarceration. That was monstrous alright: a monstrous injustice.

Steve was a talented writer and artist.

In 2014 he came first among 400 entries to win English PEN's Prison Writing competition with a story titled 'The Gates of Ytan'. The event was judged by Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night Time.

Some of his drawings won him the unfortunate distinction of being the first person in the UK to be convicted for making pornographic drawings of children, under the 2009 Coroners and Justice Act. The Metropolitan Police in London described it as a "landmark case".

I never saw the portfolio that got him into trouble. His visual talent was more evident to me through his editorship of PIE's magazine, Magpie, to which he brought obvious design and illustration flair.

He also had a serious interest in photography and film. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of boy film actors (like many at BC, no doubt!) and wrote on the subject.

It is a tragedy his talents were given relatively little scope for expression.

In truth, this had a lot to do with his own "artistic temperament" as well as the constraints of prison life.

I will stop at this point, though, as I propose to expand on the issues in question - including the notorious and now abandoned IPP (imprisonment for public protection) sentence in the UK, which kept Steve in prison long after the end of his 30-month minimum "tariff" - on my blog, Heretic TOC (see link).

source: 'Death of former PIE leader' by Tom O'Carroll; www.boychat.org/messages/1558399.htm; Boy Chat; 15 January 2020