For those who cannot possibly forget Alan Parker's stunning film Midnight Express, here is the real Billy Hayes talking about what really happened. Hayes was incarcerated in a Turkish prison for five years in 1970 for smuggling hashish, until he eventually escaped. What does surprise me is that he says he preferred the Turkish way of prison life to the military style US prison system. So one can draw the conclusion that the movie was somewhat exaggerated in depicting a hell hole....

*they speak in Turkish for the first few seconds