BEHIND THE GATES OF HELL

Welcome to the world's scariest prison

- 

At the maximum security facility, men have their hands and ankles shackled during transport

SHOCKING new footage from inside the world's most notorious prison — El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) — reveals a stinking hellhole of unimaginable suffering and despair where condemned souls are agonizingly drained of hope and left to rot and die!

The unthinkably inhumane conditions, as seen on the new British documentary Richard Madeley: Inside the World's Mega Prison, are seemingly rigged to break not only a person's body but also their soul. The roughly 40,000 inmates are not permitted visits, reading material, any manner of diversion or any means of rehabilitation — and escape is virtually impossible.

The Terrorism Confinement Center covers 57 acres

The 57-acre facility is surrounded by 19 guard towers, two barbed wire-crowned walls 30 feet tall and two feet thick, a pair of electrified fences, and gravel flooring to amplify the sound of footsteps.

No one has ever been freed — and the Salvadoran government says it has no plans to change that. Experts call imprisonment at CECOT a death sentence without execution.

“This is their present and their future and their death,” Madeley, who hosts the doc, grimly says. “I've never seen anything like this in my entire life.”

Some of the war-torn nation's most murderous gang members are imprisoned at the facility in 256 cells across eight pavilions — an average of 156 hardened criminals per cell, sources say.