Surviving Prison in Thailand | Locked Up Abroad

So now I'm running, and I had no plan and no idea where I was heading. My heart was literally just pounding through my chest to the point where I think I'm actually gonna have a heart attack. I just kept repeating to myself in my head, I was like, "I just can't get caught, I can't get caught." I've gone into sort of like this undergrowth, and I was getting scratched all over my face, my arms. I've come out the other side, and you know I'm in like a yard. I've seen a hole in the fence, I'm halfway through this hole, I think I'm gonna make it.

And then I hear this voice: "Stop! Don't move!" At that point, I knew it was over. I knew if I’d done any sort of sharp movements, he was probably going to pull the trigger, you know, and I’d be dead. He then kicks me. Now, before I know it, there’s like three or four of them; they’re all just like kicking me. They marched me back to the vehicle. Then I’ve seen—oh, just casually chatting to this police officer—and I was just in complete shock. He betrayed me massively, like probably the biggest betrayal you could have in that business. I was just seeing—I was fuming inside. I just wanted to grab hold of him.

But the future wasn’t in my hands. They give you know life sentences and the death sentences for drugs in Thailand, and I am like completely honest. So after that, I was taken to a safe house. You know, my mind was just still going round and round and doing somersaults. I remember thinking I’d come to Thailand, you know, start a new life, build the relationship back up with my dad. And here I was. My dad would find out the hard way when word got around about what just happened. You know, I was just left handcuffed to this bed, and I was there all night. My body was craving ice; I was going through like cold turkey basically.

There’s only one place that I’ll be going; they call it a monkey house—a hellhole basically. You know, they eventually put me back in the truck, and they drove me to a prison in Bangkok. I remember seeing like the wall. I just didn't know what was on the other side—that was the scary bit. Are they going to sort of target me? Anything can happen to me; this could be my future for, you know, a very long time. I didn't know how long. They basically said, "Take all your clothes off." They felt awful; your self-dignity is just gone.

They’re sort of checking in my mouth, in my genital area. You just don't even feel like you're a person anymore. You know, you just feel like a bit of meat that you know you’re just being treated that way. This place was just like, you know, a living hellhole, and this was now my new reality. The officer's taking me to the cell block. I've got all these prisoners, you know, I'm feeling—which is like "type" as they say for—and I remember falling over and seeing two time mates in front of this guard who was holding a stick.

The next minute, he’s just smashed it down on the fingertips of the inmate. He’s going to smash, smash, smash—no emotion at all. At that point, I thought, "There’s no way I want to be causing trouble in here, that’s for sure." It was actually dark at that point, so it’s like, "What now?" And then, one of the guys, he was like, "You! You sit here." It was just so crammed, and like, there was just no space at all in there. I was sleeping on a hard cold floor, in a water bowl as my pillow. It was just soul-destroying.

I felt really agitated, I was getting the cold sweats because my body was still craving ice. I got this guy at the same point shouting, and you know, he’s having some sort of nightmare. That is the most depressed and helpless that I’ve ever felt in my life, to be honest. At that point, everything that I’d heard about what these Thai prisons were like, it was true and it was happening, you know, in front of my eyes. It’s like your worst nightmare.