The Damage Done: Twelve Years of Hell in a Bangkok Prison [Anglais] [Broché]

Have you by any chance read the "Midnight express" or seen the movie thereof? Thought it was pretty horrible? Well, actually, things can get a lot, and i mean a lot worse than that.

In "The Damage Done" W.Fellows describes what can only be expressed as 12 undescribable years in a Bangkok prison complete with every human degredation you could possibly think of. Indeed, as i kept reading through his book it seemed to me as if i was reading about an experiment intended to test the absolute limits of human endurance by imposing the most horrifying conditions under incarceration. Certain experiences described by the author will be hard to stomach even for those way above the average of composure.

It's hard to even begin to imagine how anyone could survive this with his life let alone be in a relatively stable mental conditions afterwards. Imagine for example being forced to stand in a sewer neck-high. For several minutes that will probably seem like centuries. Imagine as well if you had to resort to eating the roaches of your cell as your only protein source. Sounds bad enough? It's only a mere few of the surreal moments this person endured in his 12 years in prison.

Fellows is fully aware of how many people view him since he'd been convicted as a heroin smuggler. But the question hanging from every page of his book is whether anyone is deservant of such treatment. Whether 12 years of incarceration are alone not enough..He doesnt directly answer himself. But you surely will after being through with his book. In one way or the other.

What is perhaps more interesting than the limits of human endurance that you'll inevitably have to consider is the limits of human sadism. I've pondered often myself on this and no matter what answer i came up with it's always been a disturbing one. Human saidsm is one side of our species that leaves very little doubt about how doomed we are. What we can do to other human beings is exactly what we are capable of doing and ARE doing to everything around us. And everything around us will not tolerate us for much longer, that seems to me a certainty.

Fellow's book, like basically any book written about a person's experience in prison is ultimately not about being locked up and only. It's about us. It's a harsh relentless look at what we are or what we can be. Not a nice picture by any means. In an ideal world this could be a wake-up call. But we're pretty far from an ideal world and even further from waking up.

So then, things being as they are, do what's offered. Read about the horrors we are capable of inducing on others. Attempt to do something incredible: think. This much we owe to ourselves.

There are very few things in this world that could be worse than being sentenced to a long stretch in a Thai prison. I picked up The Damage Done while on holiday in Bangkok and my trip certainly took a turn for the frighteningly paranoid.

In The Damage Done, Warren Fellows readily admits to smuggling drugs between South East Asia and his native Australia. He further admits to the many criminal indiscretions of his youth which brought him to his most unenviable predicament. However, Fellows never begs for the sympathy of the reader but rather recaptures his not so anomalous tale of traversing an Asian court system and subsequently its notorious prisons.

Fellows captures the rancid food, drug abuse and violence found in a Thai prison and the consequences such an environment plays on a captive's mental and physical state. Still, Fellows abstains from turning his experience into a preachy tale of woe, and keeps his work cuttingly sharp and extremely interesting.

It seems that the news is filled more and more with tales of Western tourists being tried and convicted in non-Western justice systems. Fellows offers a glimpse into what transpires once the news coverage dies and the convict is left to his own devices; a stranger in a strange land.

Of all the "prison" stories I've read, this is by far the best. This book has been hugely popular in Australia for years now, and there's a simple reason why - "The Damage Done" details the most shocking, repulsive, and terrifying story of survival you are ever likely to read. And despite all the gory details, you will find it hard to stop reading.

The Author did a TV interview a few years back and he was truly a broken man. Read this amazing book to find out why.