A PRISON officer conducted an affair with an inmate currently serving a 10-year jail term for battering his partner so badly she was unrecognisable.

Alisha Fallows, 23, has now been told she faces the prospect of being sent to jail herself over the relationship with Damien Baxendale at Lancaster Farms prison, on the outskirts of Lancaster.

Baxendale, from Deane in Bolton, was imprisoned in December, 2014 at Bolton Crown Court after he punched and kicked his defenceless girlfriend Chelsea Hayes in the head.

She was left with a bleed on the brain, two fractured vertebrae, a fractured eye socket which had to be reconstructed by surgery, damaged neck ligaments, black eyes and lips so swollen she was unable to open her mouth.

Neighbours had alerted police to the violence - after Baxendale began his attack at a bus stop.

And when officers turned up at his flat in Briercliffe Road they found Miss Hayes, then 23, unconscious on the bed, her clothing torn and her blood splattered around the house.

She was so badly injured her three-year-old did not recognise her.

Baxendale later pleaded guilty to causing grievous bodily harm with intent and was also given a four-year extended licence, at his sentencing hearing, by Judge Timothy Clayson.

Preston Crown Court heard Baxendale’s relationship with the prison officer took place when she was working at Lancaster farms between November 3 last year and February 14.

Judge Philip Parry told Fallows, of Goldsmith Street, Barrow, who pleaded guilty to engaging in a relationship with the inmate, “the possibility of a custodial sentence will be something that will be at the forefront of my mind” when she is sentenced.

Baxendale, who appeared before the hearing by a prison video link, admitted to possession of a prohibited item - a mobile phone - at Lancaster Farms between October 1 and December 16 last year.

The court heard this item had been used to facilitate Fallows’s offence.

Judge Parry told Baxendale his offence would bring ‘an inevitable custodial sentence’. Baxendale, he said, was already serving a ‘lengthy term of imprisonment’.

Baxendale remains in custody and Fallows was bailed ahead of a sentencing hearing on February 11 at Preston.