Day Trip to Hell
‘I went to France on a day trip to celebrate my engagement...
and ended up in a French prison for 18 months
for something I didn’t do.
It was a living HELL.
It could happen to you.
This is my true-life prison diary.’

Julia Nichols

Review Magazine article
with front page pictures

INTRODUCTION from the book

You may, quite understandably, consider drug smugglers to be a scourge on society.

You may think that, if these criminals are caught and imprisoned in a country which treats prisoners abominably, they deserve all they get.

Given the harm and the crime that drugs cause, that may be an understandable position to take.

But, what if you, an ordinary law-abiding citizen, went on a day trip to France, were pulled over, imprisoned immediately on charges of drugsmuggling, without any evidence, and put in a terrible jail…

…and you didn’t do it, but were given a long sentence and a huge fine anyway.

And what if you contacted the British Consulate and found that they were apparently unable or unwilling to help you – finishing off their letter with the words, ‘Please let us know if you have any immediate problems.’

(Presumably that means, any problems apart from being strip-searched, handcuffed, and forcibly locked up in a dirty overcrowded French prison with disgusting food and inadequate medical facilities when you were only taking an innocent day trip across the Channel).

What would you think then?

Extract from the Foreword by Peter Kinsley
(A British journalist who lived and worked in France for 25 years)

‘Day Trip to Hell is a sobering reminder – if one were needed – that Britain has very little in common with other countries of Europe, and especially not with France when it comes to our respective police and judicial systems. The most obvious difference, of course, is that, whilst in England you are innocent until proven guilty, it is the opposite in France. If you are arrested in France, you have to prove your innocence before a judge before you are released. Another major difference is the way the police are perceived, and indeed how they perceive themselves. In Britain, the police are paid by the ratepayers; they are public servants. In France, they are paid by the state, and work for the state; they do not consider themselves accountable to the people. The author of this book discovered these things for herself, and her day-by-day diary entries enlighten us all with the brutal facts of French "justice" and prison life.’

What Julia went through was a living HELL... and here, through the diaries she kept and smuggled out, she tells the story of her 18 months in prison. This book contains scenes of gang rape, starvation, suicide, torture, and beatings endured by an innocent British citizen in a country just twenty-five miles across the English Channel.