Glenn Budgell pleaded guilty earlier this month to 11 charges, including failing to provided the necessities of life to a five-year-old boy in his care. (CBC)

A judge in central Newfoundland sent a man to prison Thursday over a child neglect case that made national headlines.

Glenn Budgell, 34, had pleaded guilty last week to 11 charges, including failing to provide the necessities of life to a five-year-old boy who was in his care.

The court was told that Budgell had failed to act appropriately after the boy's legs — injured when he was placed in a scalding-hot bath — became swollen and infected. The child required skin grafts, and his legs are permanently injured.

On Thursday in a Gander court, Judge Bruce Short sentenced Budgell to 38 months in prison, as well as time already served. Budgell has been in custody since he was arrested in January, after police and a social worker acted on a tip of child neglect.

Short told the court Thursday that the facts of the case were atrocious and offensive, and that Budgell's conduct was reprehensible.

Budgell was also convicted of assault and other charges involving three boys who were in his care at the family's home in Grand Falls-Windsor. He pleaded guilty to assaulting two other boys.

There was no evidence to show that the five-year-old boy had been deliberately put into the hot water. However, the court was told that the boy had complained about the hotness of the water, and that Budgell said he must not have heard the boy.

The court was told that the boy's burns were so serious that he might have died if there had not been an intervention, and that physicians had been worried that an amputation might have been necessary.

The boy was also treated for fractured ribs, a broken pelvis, partial paralysis of one arm and brain trauma.

The boy's mother has also been charged. She cannot be identified because of a publication ban that protects her children.