Peter Lloyd: Foreign correspondent, prisoner, and now author.
Peter Lloyd was one of Australia’s most respected and high profile foreign correspondents when he was arrested on drugs charges while visiting Singapore in July 2008.
Lloyd had reported from numerous war zones, on terrorist attacks and natural disasters, and says he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder when he was charged in Singapore for possession of one gram of the methamphetamine ice.

A minor offence in most countries but a big no-no in anti-drugs Singapore, and he was sentenced to 10 months in jail.

Upon his release Lloyd wrote "Inside Story," a book detailing his time as a journalist involved in some of Asia’s biggest stories in the past decade and also his experience with Singapore’s judicial system.

Presently a senior producer with ABC's "Lateline" program, Lloyd is candid about his life leading to and after his arrest, and about his time inside a Singapore prison.







CNNGo: You've described the Changi Prison as having 'pretty basic facilities.' Paint us a picture.

Peter Lloyd: Imagine going to a school in the tropics, so it’s concrete and metal bars. It’s clean, it’s painted, cream colors, pink doors on the cells, blue doors everywhere else.

And every time one of the doors opened it sounded like that sound from "Law & Order." It really exists! It looks like what it is -- a cheap, government-built institution. It’s relentlessly concrete and there’s no finishing, there are no fancy touches.

You sleep on the floor. You have a little hand towel, and every month you got a fresh one. But you had a spoon, not a fork or a knife, and a cup.

There’s no communal meals, I guess that’s crowd control. It’s a very strange experience because in some ways it is very isolating. You don’t commune together at meal time, you don’t shower together, you only see each other when you’re mustering to go to or from to watch TV or go to the yard.

So prisoner-to-prisoner contact isn’t that great. You don’t spend much time of the day with other people. And that’s why some prisoners choose to have three prisoners to a cell instead of one. Its either one or three, you can’t have two.

CNNGo: You were inside for a little over six months, how did you count down your days?

Lloyd: It was a nice round number so it wasn’t hard to think, you know, 200 days. Actually in the diary, the one that was seized, I drew up little calendars. And every day I would tick off a little box, because you couldn’t do it on the wall -- that would be graffiti.

When you go in you are given a kind of 10 commandments which are written on the wall. One of them is don’t deface state [property]. I did a physical calendar in the book, so I had something to achieve every day.

I broke it down into periods -- X many days to Christmas, X many days to New Year, X many days till my mum’s birthday. So you find target days and you work towards that. I broke the sentence down into component parts, so every milestone was a percentage.

CNNGo: What were your days like?

Lloyd: It was very routine orientated. The turn of the key is 7 a.m. every morning. The food is done by 7:30 a.m.. By 8 a.m. you’re sitting around watching TV or reading the papers.

The papers were always one fortnight behind because of censorship. So I found news two weeks after it happened, that which they didn’t censor. In the afternoons it was watching a movie or running, and back to the rituals of serving food and then back to the cell to read until lights out, that was every single day.

CNNGo: Prison tales aren't that uncommon, Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken have written about their experiences. What makes yours different?

Lloyd: In a way it’s different because it’s not as dramatic. A lot of people come away disappointed because it’s not "Midnight Express." People have this pop culture perception of prison of being either "Midnight Express" or "Shawshank Redemption."

That’s kind of the bookends of people’s experience. Some of the reviews have sounded like they were dissatisfied that there was nothing more. It’s all there was. But the banality of it ... is that’s it. That’s what it was.

CNNGo: As a foreign correspondent there is a certain amount of risk that comes with the job. Did you ever dream this -- going to prison -- would happen to you?

Lloyd: No. There’s a certain… I think it tends to happen on big news events, because there tends to be a kind of cockiness or an attitude that the electronic guys get, print guys get it a little bit in postings too, it’s this sort of sense that they can go anyway and do anything.

And the idea that someone says no, comes as a surprise after a while. A sort of arrogance of the profession. Not many people would acknowledge it, but it’s true.

CNNGo: You've said in an interview about being a foreign correspondent: "If you're going to be the medium for the community in these strange, weird and wonderful places ... you've got to be up the front." How "up the front" were you in prison?

Lloyd: I didn’t see any point to sitting in my cell and feeling sorry for myself. It wasn’t going to go any faster if I was unhappy so, I think one of the things I learned from this process is that I have an adaptive personality.

I cut my cloth to circumstances, eventually, not straight away, and I think prison is an example of that in "I’m going to be here, I might as well get something out of it." Be civil to the people in the normal course of your life you would never meet.

I would never normally meet a mad Chinese wannabe-Australian drug dealer. Its not snobbery, you just don’t get to the intimacy of the meeting of those people. You might meet them but they’ll see you as a journo and see themselves as the victim.

There’s a lot of this real victim-grief thing, a lot of them loved to be seen as the victim. But when you’re one of them, you eventually peel away enough layers and they’re just another prisoner and you’re just another prisoner to them. No one, ever, went "Wow you’re from the ABC." They didn’t know what it was. They couldn’t give a shit.


"Inside Story": Peter Lloyd's story of his life in the field and behind bars.
CNNGo: Where did the idea for the book come from?

Lloyd: I did it because I needed to get stuff out and it filled in time, and it was part of the making you feel better and getting through it. Turning it into a book wasn’t really my intention in the beginning, getting through the sentence was more of the thing.

I wasn’t really convinced until I came back and started talking to an agent that there was an appetite for the book. I didn’t assume people would want to hear my story.

CNNGo: Have you had any response from the Singaporean government or authorities to your book?

Lloyd: Not a word. I’m sure they do know about it but silence is their chalice.

CNNGo: How does prison in Singapore compare to other prisons in Asia you have visited as a journalist?

Lloyd: First class. It really is quite good. I mean its authoritarian but it’s such ruthless efficiency. If I was sick there would have been medical treatment. If I was psychologically in a crisis, there would have been someone I could talk to.

But you’re well fed in terms of food and medical, you’re pretty well looked after, in the sense that they had a sort of paternal state responsibility to look after you while they’re punishing you.

CNNGo: What one lesson have you taken away with you?

Lloyd: The thing I take out of it is people do make mistakes. The thing is, when something goes wrong in your life, you have to make it right. You have to find your own way out of it.

People will help you to an extent, but your own resilience, your own inner qualities are what are going to make you get to the best destination.

CNNGo: What person did you think of the most while inside?

Lloyd: Whilst there were other people and other issues going on, I had to work out me. Once you work out you, you can work out everyone else.

CNNGo: What was the best thing that happened to you in prison?

Lloyd: Being able to read so much. It killed a lot of time, but the thing I didn’t really appreciate, it's also an escape to fantasy and imagination, and when you’re in a prison and there’s nothing to look at, no distractions, it’s like it’s an intensification of that experience. So the joy of reading was amazing.

CNNGo: What was your experience of the Singapore judicial system?

Lloyd: Within the limits of the system I did okay. I don’t think anyone thinks the system is not directed effectively by the People's Action Party. In another system a magistrate with discretion could have exercised it.

The magistrate who dealt with me had no discretion, so they couldn’t exercise it and that’s the rigidity of the Singapore system. The enforcement of laws is handed down from above, so, if that’s a criticism then I’m not the only one who thinks it.

CNNGo: Why did you think the authorities stopped you from bringing your diary out of prison with you?

Lloyd: I think the taking of the diary was probably a mistake, and the wise heads who run the country probably would have said: "For f**k’s sake, he’s probably going to do it anyway." I think it was the political aspect that would have taken it across the line in terms of decisions, but who knows. Only they can tell me.

CNNGo:
 Why do you think there is little public knowledge about what it is like inside a Singaporean prison?

Lloyd: There’s a tendency in society to regard prisoners of deserving of their fate. So, in a kiasu (scared to lose) society like Singapore it’s an even sharper view. Singaporeans are natural authoritarians as people.

This finger waggling do-this-don’t-do-that, this is just the way they are. It doesn’t surprise me that there’s an authoritarian government because that’s the way the people are.

It’s a perfect fit, by and large. It’s just the character of the people so I think in that society [in prison] they tend to think that they’re garbage and they’re deserving of their fate.

"Inside Story" can be purchased via Amazon.



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