WOMEN For Independence has stepped up its fight to significantly reduce the number of women in Scottish jails, urging the country’s main political parties to back a new target of having no more than 100 female inmates in prison by 2020.

The WFI movement, founded to campaign for a Yes vote in last year’s referendum, set the target at its first annual general meeting attended by around 500 members in Perth at the weekend.

Currently there are 374 women in jails in Scotland, according to Scottish Prison Service figures, and ministers have indicated that they want to reduce the country’s female prison population through the greater use of community justice programmes.

Maggie Mellon, a member of Women for Independence’s new national committee and former social worker, told The National she would write to Justice Secretary Michael Matheson to seek a meeting to discuss the target. She added 19 babies had been born to women in prison over the past five years alone and thousands of children were affected by mothers and fathers in jail.

“Sentencing decisions mean that 19 babies have been born to women in prison in the last five years alone, and 27000 children in Scotland today are affected by parental imprisonment, more than are affected by divorce and separation,” she said.

“We voted unanimously to condemn the number of women in prison, and the conditions that they are held in. Women for Independence believes that community resources are the best response and need secure and permanent investment urgently.

“We want all parties standing in the Scottish Parliament elections to commit to having no more than 100 women in prison in Scotland by 2020. One hundred was the number that was aimed at in 1998 when the population was at 200. Instead the women’s prison population has almost doubled.”

The AGM on Saturday also heard from two young women, Kim and Susie, with experience of the criminal justice system.

Susie was imprisoned at the age of 17 for kicking a phone box while going through an emotional crisis. She left prison a short time later a heroin user, having been introduced to the drug by an adult cell mate. She served several years in prison for a string of offences that clearly came directly from the trauma that she was suffering. Prison compounded the damage done to her.

Kim, a young mother, who had to leave home at age 15, had actually hoped to be sent to prison when she was sentenced for offences committed as a result of trying to escape poverty and having no protection from the threat of violence and retaliation.

Women for Independence was among organisations to successfully call this year for ministers to scrap plans for the new £75 million women’s super prison HMP Inverclyde, in Greenock.

It was originally intended to replace Scotland’s only existing all-female prison HMP Cornton Vale in Stirling, which had been severely criticised in a series of inspection reports and most damagingly by Dame Elish Angiolini in her 2012 Commission of Women Offenders report, in which she described it as “not fit for purpose”.

The campaign against the new jail began after the Howard League for Prison Reform, the penal reform group, called for it not to be built as it feared its existence would lead to more women being jailed.

Plans for it ran counter to Angiolini’s recommendations that women offenders should be given more support through community justice projects and helped with the addiction and mental health issues often driving their offending.

A Scottish Government spokesperson said: “The Scottish Government is committed to reducing the number of female prisoners in Scotland.

“With our partners, we have made significant progress towards meeting the recommendations of the Commission on Women Offenders, which aim to improve outcomes for women offenders and address the size of the female prison population.

“Substantial improvements have been made in helping women offenders to address their problems and to prevent them reoffending.”