Teesside Crown Court Judge warns Hartlepool mother, 40, drugs will kill her as she is jailed for burglary

Forty-year-old Claire Bartholomew said that she was determined to succeed to build a new life with her two children and her partner.

But a fortnight after her last release from prison she went back onto drugs and committed another burglary to fund her addiction.

Bartholomew from Hartlepool had been prescribed a heroin substitute while in prison but when she went into a pharmacy with a prescription she was ejected because she had been barred for previous shoplifting.

She was later caught burgling a nearby house where a family was sleeping on March 26, said prosecutor Tabitha Buck

Bartholomew was under the influence of drugs when the male householder heard her downstairs and he put her outside, Teesside Crown Court was told.

She still had her prescription for Methadone and a tablet computer that had been stolen in an unrelated burglary.

Bartholomew, who was on release licence, could remember nothing about the burglary, said Peter Sabiston, defending, in mitigation.

She appeared over a videolink from Low Newton Prison where she had been recalled to continue serving the second half of her previous sentence until this December.

Mr Sabiston said: ”She has the capacity to recognise what is causing her problems.

”She is not inherently bad. She is no longer a young woman, and while in prison she wants to establish a relationship with the DART team (Drugs and Alcohol rehabilitation Team).

”She is determined to live a happy life with her children and her partner who is clean of drugs, and she knows how to go and do it.”

The judge Recorder Andrew Dallas told her: ”It’s obvious to you as it is to everybody else that heroin is destroying your life.

“It will continue to do so until you quit, if it does not kill you before then.”

Bartholomew of Jackson Street, Hartlepool, was jailed for 14 months after she pleaded guilty to burglary and handling the stolen tablet, and a sneak-in burglary and theft of a purse from a fish and chip shop which she committed before her previous sentence.