Published: 2009-11-23

TVNZ.co.nz

For most people, Bali is paradise on earth, a place of sun and surf and steamy nights of dancing and abandon.

But for the 1000 odd inmates of Kerobokan Prison Bali is hell on earth - a place of murder, rape, depravity, drug addiction and disease.

Kerobokan is the home of convicted drug smugglers Schapelle Corby and the Bali Nine.

Some may have a vague impression that, with its tennis courts and DVD players and plans for a Schapelle-run beauty salon, it's not that bad a place to do time.

But a new book by Australian journalist and author Kathryn Bonella, called Hotel Kerobokan, shatters that illusion.v"I think a lot of Australians have been shocked," Bonella says.

"The prison definitely tries to hold up a good face to the public, but you scratch the surface and it really is a hellhole."

Bonella's book does more than scratch the surface.

Based on interviews with dozens of prisoners, past and present, it delves deep into the prison's dark heart, and is rich with grisly detail.

It shows a filthy, chronically-overcrowded and dangerous world where psychopathic murderers sleep alongside petty thieves and tourists convicted of minor drug offences.

The book takes us inside the women's block, where up to 15 women are forced to cram inside cells with broken toilets that spew excrement across the floor.

It takes us inside cell tikus, the rat-infested solitary confinement cell that has no toilet, forcing inmates relieve themselves on the floor, where they also sleep, or in plastic bags.

It takes us inside the prison's raging drug trade that makes addicts of the previously clean, and which corrupt prison guards help run - for a price.

And it takes us inside sex night, when those same corrupt guards work as pimps, organising prostitutes and conjugal visits - again, for a price.

"As long as the guards are only paid about $100 a month, how can you stop them working for the prisoners and taking bribes?" Bonella says.

"In a day they can double their monthly salary, pretty much. How do you stop corruption when people are so poorly paid?"

Bonella, who also helped write Schapelle's 2006 autobiography, had unprecedented access to the prison and spent hundreds of hours on the inside.

Things that at first stunned her - the fact that a violent inmate worked as the prison's doorman and was allowed out on to the street to wave down taxis for visitors, for example - soon became "no big deal".

"But things did continue to shock me," she says.

"I mean, it took me two years to do this book, and the stories that I heard, the things I actually saw, they continually did surprise and shock me."

The book features a colourful cast of characters, including Saidin, the hitman with a penchant for decapitation who likes to catch poisonous snakes and keep them as pets in his cell.

There's Sonia Gonzales Miranda, also known as the Black Monster, the wild Timorese woman who likes to pick fights and throw her own faeces.

There's Iwan Thalib, the drug boss who ran an ecstasy factory at the back of his furniture workshop inside the prison.

There are also the men of Laskar Bali, the gang that effectively took over the prison and launched a reign of terror marked by brutal beatings and gang rape.

And of course, there are those we do know, like Schapelle, the Bali Nine and the Bali bombers.

One of the most moving chapters focuses on Scott Rush, the 23-year-old facing the firing squad for his role in the Bali Nine.

"Sometimes I think I would rather get shot than have to spend my life in here," Rush told Bonella, hammering home just how hellish Kerobokan can be.

There's also a section on the Bali bombers that reveals how they were allowed to preach to the prison population, radicalising scores of impressionable young Muslims, as well as fund and organise subsequent attacks from their cells.

And while the book sometimes seems to delight a little too much in the details of various sexual and scatological goings-on, at least it's unvarnished.

"I just absolutely don't know how they survive in there, in the conditions that they live in," Bonella says.

Hotel Kerobokan: The Shocking Inside Story Of Bali's Most Notorious Jail by Kathryn Bonella, published by Macmillan Australia