Low self-esteem can be crippling at the best of times – when you add mental health issues, a history of domestic violence or substance abuse into the mix, the result can be devastating. According to Women in Prison , women in custody are five times more likely to have a mental health condition than a woman on the outside, and 46% of women in prison have previously suffered from domestic violence. 52% of women surveyed by the charity said they'd used heroin, crack or cocaine in the four weeks prior to custody.When you are dealing with the welfare of some of society’s most vulnerable, providing them with food of high nutritional value arguably becomes a matter of great urgency. Even the report highlights the need, stating: “Studies have also found that nutritional supplements reduce disciplinary incidents, aggression and violent behaviour. In other words, prisoners eating well is not just a matter of prisoner wellbeing but is also of practical and financial concern to the prison service."Financially, like the majority of the UK’s institutions, food spending is tight. Spend per day, per prisoner on food is around £2, compared to £10 in hospitals. Perri suggests that more money may be needed to improve food. “I imagine quality food comes at a price” she says – but Sophie disagrees.“I don’t think it’s funding” she says, “They need to teach the women cooking to actually take pride in the food they’re serving. A few times we had dish cloths served up in the food from where something had spilt in the kitchen and they’d just been told to scoop it up and chuck it back in the tray.”Talk to anyone about the issue of prison food and the same question crops up: Why should we feed our prisoners well when they’re supposed to be getting punished? Unlike children or patients, these are individuals who have committed crimes or disrupted society, often at the expense of others.But with prison suicides and assaults at a 10 year high, something is obviously going wrong with our prison system. And it would be ignorant to rule out prisoners' diets as a contributing factor. If simple, cheap, nutritional food, packed with fresh fruit and vegetables has transformed our country’s classrooms in the last 10 years, surely there’s an argument for doing the same in the UK’s prisons.Until that happens, however, prisoners are finding clever ways of feeding themselves the good stuff. Sophie remembers “Keeping the seeds from the tomatoes of the very occasional salad we had and planting them, in the hope I’d get tomatoes.”