Marching Powder, Rusty Young

When Rusty Young, a twenty-something Australian lawyer on a backpacking holiday in South America, heard about a convicted English drug smuggler giving guided tours of his jail in Bolivia, he was intrigued. So intrigued that not only did he take the illegal tour himself, he ended up bribing the prison guards to let him stay, spending four months sharing a cell with Thomas, the English inmate, and recording what must be one of the most remarkable prison stories of all time. This is an incredible story of life on the inside of a third world prison. An adrenalin-charged account of drugs, corruption and violence that exposes life on the inside - where the hierarchy is based on money and major crime, where anything is available at a price, and where the prison contains one of the biggest and busiest cocaine laboratories in South America. But more than that, it is a tale of an unlikely friendship, forged in the oddest of circumstances, between a drug smuggler and a lawyer, and a jail where horror is leavened by humour and the greatest cruelty lives side by side with the greatest humanity.