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Behind prison walls
For the first time ever a film crew was granted full access to Kerobokan jail, which sits in the centre of Bali's tourist mecca. Foreign Correspondent meets five prisoners who call the space inside these walls home.
Kerobokan is built to hold just over 320 male prisoners, but at any given time there are at least four times that number.
Almost 1,300 men squeeze into cells in 12 separate blocks that were built in 1979.
To many Australians, Bali's Kerobokan jail is a place of creepy fascination in an island playground.
Foreign Correspondent captures what life is really like for five prisoners.
Matthew Norman
At 18, Matthew Norman from Sydney's Quakers Hill was the youngest member of the Bali Nine.
He was promised $15,000 to act as a drug mule and intended to use the money to buy a car.
Now at 30, he has been in Kerobokan jail for just over 12 years. He has been given a life sentence, which in Indonesia actually means life.
Today, the law is life. Laws around the world are forever changing. We don't know what tomorrow brings.
Matthew is considered a model inmate by the prison governor who is now seeking clemency from President Joko Widodo to have his sentence reduced from life to 20 years.
David Fox
British journalist David Fox is a former correspondent with Reuters. He was sentenced to seven months in prison for possessing just over nine grams of hashish.
Fox says the prison's reputation is far worse than the reality. He is one of the 6 per cent of prisoners in Kerobokan who are foreigners.
If you come in here with a negative mindset I think there's a lot of dark holes you could fall into.
Fox was released during filming. He says he treated his time in prison as a journalistic assignment and plans to write a book covering his time inside and his work as a war correspondent.
Heru Saputra
Heru was raised in Bali and is serving an 18-month sentence after being caught using methamphetamine. He is the leader of his cell block which is grossly overcrowded with twice as many inmates as it was built to hold.
We just have to accept what we have here. This place is overloaded but we have to just live with it. There is no other place. Where else can we go
More than 90 per cent of prisoners in Kerobokan are Indonesian and more than 78 per cent have been convicted on drug charges. Many like Heru have been inside more than once.
Si Yi Chen
Si Yi Chen is Australian and another member of the Bali Nine.
The 32-year-old is serving a life sentence for drug trafficking. Immigrating from China with his family when he was 12, he had a strained relationship with his father throughout his schooling years, which he says is one of the reasons he rebelled.
I still think I might get out and maybe I still have a chance to have a reduction. As time goes by it gets harder because you're starting to lose hope. You're starting to think: what's the point?
As a child, Si Yi Chen dreamed of being a pilot. He says he had hoped to use the $15,000 he was promised as a drug mule to go to aviation school.
The prison governor is seeking clemency to have Chen's sentence reduced to 20 years.
Bagus Gede Swimbawa
Swimbawa is serving seven years for fraud. The 43-year-old is Kerobokan prison's chief chef. Once a chef on a cruise ship based in Miami, he prides himself on improving the quality of the prison food.
When I came here the food is not really good and then I come here and I try and change it and now it's getting better.
The prison is allocated just 15,000 rupiah per day ($1.60) for each prisoner. For that, Swimbawa and a small team of prisoners can cook 600 kilograms of rice, and very basic extras.
Watch the full story Life Inside Kerobokan at 9.30pm on ABCTV, Iview & YouTube.
Topics: prisons-and-punishment, law-crime-and-justice, human-interest, bali, indonesia
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