Customer Reviews

The Damage Done: Twelve Years of Hell in a Bangkok Prison

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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.

This book was in incredible read. The descriptions were so grotesque that my wife claimed that it was fictitious! I grabbed the book at a hotel during my honeymoon and could not put it down during the following 24 hours. While the story itself is beyond a nightmare, the manner in which it was written was superb. The author makes no attempt to rationalize or excuse what he did, but instead details his mistakes and consequences.

"THINK ABOUT THE MOST WRETCHED DAY OF YOUR LIFE. MAYBE IT WAS WHEN SOMEBODY YOU LOVED DIED OR WHEN YOU WERE BADLY HURT IN AN ACCIDENT, OR A DAY WHEN YOU WERE SO TERRIFIED, YOU COULD SCARCELY BEAR IT.

NOW IMAGINE 4000 SUCH DAYS TOGETHER IN ONE CONTINUOUS CHUNK" .

In 1978 Newtown footballer Paul Hayward, William Sinclair, and Warren Fellows was convicted of heroin trafficking between Thailand and Australia. They were sentenced to life imprisonment in the notorious Bang Kwang prison - better known as the Bangkok Hilton.

For the Australian public, Warren Fellow's story ended in 1978. For Fellows, it was the beginning of 12 years of hell in a place where sewer rats and cockroaches are the only nutritious food, where autocratic prison guards giggle as they deliver pulverising blows and where the worst punishment is the khun deo - solitary confinement, Thai style. The Damage Done is one man's story of an unthinkable nightmare. It is not Warren Fellows' plea for forgiveness nor his denial of guilt, but a story of endurance and survival and the abuse of human rights during which Warren speaks with frankness of the decade of life he wasted in leg irons. It is an essential read: hearbreaking, fascinating and impossible to put downIt is a brave and compelling read that poses harrowing questions on the nature of justice.

I read this book about 2 or three years ago. Several friends and myself passed this book around and each read it in about 2 hours. It is absolutely amazing ... it took my breath away to know that people are actually treated in such a cruel manor. This book it one of my favorite's. I would highly recommend this book, as it displays one man's courage to fight to live.

This book is really excellent and as others, I couldn't put it down in the next few hours. I actually went to the "Bangkok Hilton" and visited a prisoner there. The situation isn't improved much, but probably better than what described in the book, at least nobody checked my axx when I went in the Bangkwang Prison. But I have to say, Mr Fellow, I know you have suffered a lot, I sympatize your father and mother, when I read about them (through your description) I felt very sad that I even wanted to cry, but why on earth did you put yourself and your parents in a situation like this? This book is a very good read, but I think Mr Fellow tried to steer some blame away, please remember, he has the sole responsibility to prevent everything from happening. I'm not saying you deserve everything you have suffered, but again, this was preventable.

before reading damaged done i didnt think i would have the compassion i now have for warren fellows a convicted drug dealer. This book shocked me and and made me realize that there is always room for compassion and forgivness and that every body deserves basic humanity.

These would be the first three adjectives I've use to describe this book.

It didn't seem to develop in much of a linear fashion the way that stories ordinarily do, but instead leaps from one torture to another with no remarkable amount of literary finesse. As you surely know by now, the daily ordeal that Fellows managed to survive are described in excruciating detail. I knew this, like anyone even considering this book would, but it was still excessive. Having spent the last year in SW China, I'd consider my tolerance for shock and disgust to be not insignificantly higher than that of the average American, but it was still too morbid for me to really enjoy at all. Fellows should be commended both for writing a piece that scores of readers are anxious to digest and especially on blaming his decade of torture on his own faulty judgement rather than on foriegn judicial process. Their methods are barbaric, but it's hard to argue that Fellows authoring this wouldn't have an influence on any well-read person considering a career in international drug trade.

I hope that whoever reads this enjoys it more than I did, but probably wouldn't be recommending this one. Lesson learned, if you somehow didn't know this already: don't smuggle drugs into Thailand if you aren't prepared to answer to horrific consequences like these.

I read this book some years ago and it has always stayed with me. This christmas decided to buy it as a gift. This is an unbelievable story of one man's survival in "The Hilton Bangkok", the most notorious Thai prison. A must read.