SEX, drugs and corruption.

These are common issues plaguing prisons the world over.

Now an Australian journalist and author has come out with a book on the goings on in Bali's Kerobokan prison.

"Hotel Kerobokan" is the product of 18 months of research by Kathryn Bonella, who visited the prison every day to interview inmates and observe the relationships between prisoners and guards, reports the Jakarta Globe.

Bonella is the biographer of convicted Australian drug smuggler Schapelle Corby.

Schapelle has spent five years in the jail for marijuana possession and who, Bonella says, has become immune to the daily horrors.

Schapelle Corby has spent five years in the jail for marijuana possession.

According to the publishers, Macmillan Australia, the book depicts Kerobokan as "a bizarre nether world where murderers sleep alongside petty thieves, drug and alcohol addiction is rife, guards are corrupt and money talks."

Bonella writes in the book that at the prison, she encountered a world where "the unbelievable fast became ordinary," Australian website news.com.au reported.

"I was fascinated with this crazy world of drugs, sex and gambling - where paedophiles, serial killers and rapists sleep alongside card sharks, petty thieves and unlucky tourists caught at a club with one or two ecstasy pills in their pocket," she writes in the book.

The book will be released internationally next month.