THOUSANDS of woman are imprisoned “needlessly” every year while women’s centres and “diversion schemes” are cut, a coalition of politicians and charities announced today.

A new report by the all-party parliamentary group on women in the penal system found that the Tories’ changes to probation could be sucking more women into the criminal justice system.

During the inquiry a chief constable recounted how many of those women arrested were “trapped in a cycle of multiple disadvantage and where domestic violence was a common occurrence.”

In the year to June 2014 more than 9,000 women were jailed or on remand in England and Wales.

Seventy per cent of the women in prison on remand were found not to require a prison sentence, either because they were innocent or because their crimes were not serious enough.

Howard League for Penal Reform chief executive Frances Crook said: “Far too many women are being criminalised by a broken system.

“The evidence given to parliamentarians was overwhelming.

“Change is needed.”