A SERIAL shoplifter’s year-long campaign against York shops is over as she starts a prison sentence.

Gemma Christine Bradford, 35, carried out 20 thefts in stores of all kinds across the city, including the charity shop at York Hospital.

York magistrates and the city’s district judge let her keep her freedom three times and ordered her to do rehabilitation work with the probation service, but when she continued to raid shops, she was jailed.

District judge Adrian Lower said: “I am told you have not engaged at all with your offender manager, you have not kept any appointments or taken the opportunity to rehabilitate yourself.”

He jailed her for 30 weeks. The sentence included a four-week prison sentence he had suspended for 12 months on August 7 on condition she work with the probation service and stay out of all city centre shops, and a 10-week prison sentence the magistrates had suspended in May on similar conditions.

She had committed the thefts for which she was sentenced in May while subject to a community order for more thefts which included a ban on entering named shops and rehabilitation activities.

Bradford, of no fixed address, was arrested on warrant after she failed to appear before York Magistrates' Court to stand trial in September for stealing baby milk from Morrisons’ Foss Islands Road store in July. She was convicted in her absence.

After her arrest, she pleaded guilty to stealing a toy worth £19.99 from Toymaster in Market Street in the city centre on September 12 and criminal damage by trashing her room at the Walmgate hostel run by York Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders on September 8.

Altogether, she had committed 20 thefts since the summer of 2016, plus the criminal damage offence and two failures to attend court.

Her solicitor Craig Robertson said she lived a chaotic lifestyle.

On the occasion she stole the baby milk “she had effectively been forced to go into the store by someone waiting outside the store to beat her up.”

She had “very poor health” with physical and psychiatric problems and had offended to fund a drug habit.