“The public have to have confidence that people like yourself are being supervised, and if the police pay you a visit they’re perfectly entitled to do so.”

The judge then warned Baldwin that he could still be caged over the offences at future review hearings.

He said: “If I get a [Community Payback Order Progress Review] Report in similar terms, I may have to revoke the Order and send you to jail.”

Baldwin was snared by child protection officers after downloading vile abuse photos onto his computers on two occasions, six years apart.

He was found to have 34 accessible images, 21 of which were assessed as being the most extreme there is.

He obtained the images between October 17, 2013 and November 26, 2019, at his home in Paisley, near Glasgow, and a lawyer said he’d gone looking for child abuse photos twice when he had been feeling low.

She said: “He did it in 2013 when things were bad for him and again in 2019 when he was at a low ebb in his life.

“This was done at very bad points in his life and he used it as a coping mechanism to deal with stress.

“It was done as a form of release from the bad things that were going on in his life.”

When sentenced in September, Baldwin was placed on the Sex Offenders’ Register for three years, banned from having any contact with children under 17, and told to perform 300 hours of unpaid work within three years.

He was also told to attend the Moving Forward, Making Changes programme, which works with sex offenders, and he was banned from using any device capable of accessing the internet without prior permission.