A DEALER seen by police spitting out drug wraps and handing them to addicts brazenly told a judge to let him rot in prison.

Alan Harris’ barrister had sought to get the 45-year-old off an immediate prison sentence, saying he was making considerable progress and wanted to help his mum reconfigure the family home ready for his leg amputee dad’s return from hospital.

But when it became clear he was going to be jailed Harris’ mood changed. He chuntered at the judge: “Just give me what you want. If that’s what you want to give me, give me the seven years.

“I don’t care. Let me rot in jail.”

Harris was jailed for five years and seven months. Judge Jason Taylor QC said he had to impose a longer jail sentence by law as it was Harris’ third drugs trafficking offence.

After hearing Harris had pleaded guilty at the first opportunity, was off the drugs and had got himself accommodation at a hostel, the judge knocked a year and a half off the mandatory seven-year sentence. Judge Taylor said: “I’m told you’ve seen the light. I hope that’s the case and I hope you continue to see the light after the sentence I have imposed.”

Harris had been given a chance in 2015 when he avoided a jail spell for dealing class A drugs in the town. “You were given a chance then, a chance you were perhaps fortunate to get,” Judge Taylor said. “Yet you continued to commit a number of unrelated offences and you breached the order more than once.”

Prosecuting, Tessa Hingston said police had watched Harris go up to known drug addicts in Swindon town centre on January 19 this year, spit out wraps of what appeared to be drugs and handed something believed to be cash in return. When stopped, police found £40.10 on him. A search of his room at Culvery Court homeless hostel uncovered 89 wraps of crack cocaine and 39 wraps of heroin, worth around £1,200.

He was said to have been asked to keep the drugs in his room by another resident of Culvery Court. The day he was stopped by police was a one-off, having been asked to drop off the drugs by another.

Harris, of no fixed address, pleaded guilty to two counts of possession with intent to supply class A drugs.

George Threlfall, defending, said his client had been out of trouble for nine months and had put himself back on his feet. He was helping his mum while his diabetic dad was in hospital for a leg amputation operation.

Harris, with 44 conviction for 148 offences, had been in and out of prison since his youth: “He is a man for whom prison doesn’t hold much fear. It’s an inconvenience and it would come at a very difficult time of his life, when he wants to convert his mother’s house so when his father is discharged from hospital they will have the downstairs converted.

“What he fears is when he’s released he’ll come out to nothing again.”