A NOTORIOUS burglar once paid a weekly allowance by the authorities in an effort to stop him stealing has been jailed after he admitted breaking into a Swindon home.

In the 90s, Casey Bowen was labelled Pocket Money Boy by the tabloids when Gloucestershire social services took the unusual step of paying his family £60 a week to deter him from thieving.

Now 39-year-old Bowen has been jailed for four years and 10 months for raiding a home on Rodbourne in July and hiding a mobile phone up his backside in an attempt to smuggle the device into Oxfordshire prison HMP Bullington.

Sentencing him at Gloucester Crown Court this week, Judge Ian Lawrie QC told Bowen he had been given a golden opportunity to get his life back on track – but he had been back committing burglaries just months after he was released from prison.

“He is not pulling the wool over my eyes anymore,” Judge Lawrie said.

Bowen, of no fixed address, pleaded guilty to burglary when he appeared before Swindon Crown Court in early August. But the case was sent to the Gloucester court, as the vast bulk of Bowen’s crimes have been committed in that county.

The Swindon court heard that Bowen had been promised help with his attention deficit hyperactivity disorder following his last conviction for burglary in 2018. Given a three-year sentence by a Gloucester judge, Bowen was released from prison in April without support or medication.

After falling out with associates in Cheltenham, he fled to Swindon where he had been put under pressure by others to offend.

On July 2, he was said to have ransacked a home in Rodbourne Road, throwing clothes across the floor and making off with cash and thousands-of-pounds worth of jewellery.