A CHARITY has urged magistrates in Cumbria to stop sending women to prison after figures showed courts in the county were nearly four times as likely to jail female criminals.

The Howard League for Penal Reform today released data showing how sentencing rates for women vary across the country.

Their research revealed that 2.7 per cent of all female defendants in Cumbria were given custodial sentences in 2011 - the highest rate in the country - and up from 1.7 per cent in 2006.

It wants to see more community sentences, which the group argues are more effective in cutting crime, handed out, claiming some prison terms are passed ‘unnecessarily’.

The figure for Cumbria is almost four times that of Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Northumbria and Wiltshire.

The annual meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Women in the Penal System was due to meet to discuss the issue today.

Frances Crook, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: “It is disappointing to see more women being sent to jail in Cumbria when the national trend has seen a welcome drop in the use of short prison sentences for women.

“We are also concerned that it remains the case that a woman convicted of a non-violent offence is more likely to go to prison than a man.

“Women who find themselves in court often need a lot of support. They are often victims of crimes themselves such as domestic abuse.

“Sending these women to prison for a few weeks is not the answer to the complex issues in their lives.

“We are concerned that legislation currently going through parliament may make the situation for women worse.

“The Offender Rehabilitation Bill extends short prison sentences with a year of supervision in the community but it is unclear how specialist services for women will survive as the government seeks to privatise probation using large regional contracts that will squeeze out small local providers.”

Magistrates’ courts in England and Wales handed down almost 287,000 sentences to women and girls in 2011, imposing immediate custody in more than 4,300 cases, or 1.5 per cent.

Four in five women were fined and around nine per cent of cases resulted in community sentences.

On average, magistrates’ courts reduced their use of custody for women by a third between 2001 and 2011, the charity said.

But there were nine criminal justice areas where the rate of imprisonment increased over that period, one of which was Cumbria.

The maximum sentence that magistrates’ courts can impose is six-months or up to 12 months in total for more than one offence.

Earlier this year, the Ministry of Justice published statistics which showed that short-term prison sentences were failing to cut crime, whereas community sentences have a far better success rate.

Information showed 36 per cent of adults who began community orders between April 2010 and March 2011 went on to reoffend within a year, compared to 58 per cent of adults went on to reoffend after time behind bars.