A “PROLIFIC” criminal convicted of his 34th burglary in the last 17 years has been jailed for nearly three years.

Bradford Crown Court heard that Damien Hawkins, 42, had continued to offend to feed his addiction to Class A drugs, most recently heroin.

Prosecutor Philip Adams told the court that Hawkins had pleaded guilty to two counts of burglary linked to incidents on October 11 last year.

At around 5pm, he used a garden rake to smash a ground-floor kitchen window and gain access to a house in Clough Street, West Bowling, Bradford, cutting himself in the process.

Around an hour later, he removed a UPVC living room window to enter a house on nearby Birch Lane, ransacking rooms and taking £380 worth of items including a games console, laptop, mobile phone, and the key to an Audi A6. Later that night, an unidentified thief tried to use the key to steal the car, but the attempt was foiled.

Hawkins was caught after leaving his blood at the scene of the two burglaries, which he admitted by entering guilty pleas at his first court hearing.

Mr Adams said that Hawkins, of Pembroke Street, Bradford, had 28 previous convictions for 125 offences, including 32 for burglary, with his most recent jail terms for the offence imposed in 2013 and 2015.

Rebecca Young, mitigating, said the reason behind Hawkins’ offending was a drug addiction that started when he was just 15 years old. She said he had committed the most recent “opportunistic and unsophisticated” offences to fund his heroin habit.

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She said: “He deeply regrets his offending, and accepts there is no mitigation aside from his guilty pleas.”

Sentencing him to 33 months in prison, Judge David Hatton QC told Hawkins: “You are, as you accept, a prolific burglar. It is the number of your previous convictions that aggravate both of these offences to the extent that it is appropriate to move outside the category range of sentencing guidelines.”