When Dr Maria Leitner arrived at HMP Styal to serve a four-and-a-half-year sentence in 2018, she was handed a Hello Kitty T-shirt, a pair of leggings and a “pretty rough pair of trainers”, which she would go on to wear every day for the next 18 months.
“By the time winter came, they were full of holes,” the 56-year-old told openDemocracy. “My feet were regularly wet.”
Leitner’s experience was not unusual. A charity worker told this website of seeing women in prison wearing “flip flops in the snow”, while the official prison inspectorate reported in November 2023 that “many women” in HMP Peterborough could not go outside to exercise “because they did not have a coat, jumper or appropriate footwear”.
